Brief escapes

During the Covid-19 confinement, in the breaks from the laptop and the jhadu, pocha, bartan, kapda routine, The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse became a refuge of sorts, writes Aditi Phadnis

One of the best things about growing up on the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus in the 1970s and 1980s was Gita Book Depot (GBD). No one ever saw Gita or asked who she was. But the owner, known only as “Dada”, was a portly individual who had a bushy grey beard, vaguely a la Fidel, and leaned to the Left (everyone on campus in those days, including the JNU bus driver Tiwari, leaned to the Left). Dada belonged to Bengal but was known occasionally to snigger about customers from a certain eastern state neighbouring Bengal (JNU got a large