A bookmark for the crusty old coot
WELL, my friends, the time has come – not to raise the roof and have some fun but to roll up my trusty Mont Blanc and tighten the lid on the ink well.
Higgins is being retired. It is transformation, they tell me. Crusty old toppies must make way for young blood and bright ideas.
My only sadness is that
Maya won’t be waking up at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning. For as long as his old mate Higgins has written this column, he has trekked up the driveway at 5am to fetch the Sunday Tribune in underwear that has survived enemy fire in two world wars.
Sugni, his kitchen neighbour in my beloved Bangladesh market district, will be spared the hilarious sight that has, like clockwork, greeted her Sunday morning sweeping.
Heaven forbid that Maya should cancel his subscription. That would upset Chumpa from across the road no end.
She borrows the paper every Sunday afternoon, starting with the Herald and then heading to the classifieds to check who has died in the past week.
It’s not good business for the proprietors at Sekunjalo that a single paper gets read 10 times over on the same street, but kudos to the editor for turning out such fine copy.
And so the time has come that when people drive along the Higginson Highway into Chatsworth, they will no longer see the placards that announce the salacious goings on that this column has become well known for revealing.
At least the Higgins and
Son name will remain on the highway. Its most famous resident, Highway Sheila, has seen to it that there is no renaming of the famous motorway to either Yasser Arafat or Amichand Rajbansi in spite of Mike Sutcliffe’s best efforts.
Retirement will mean that I can keep an eye on Pundit Maharaj hunched over his walking stick hoping for a gust of wind as the factory girls rush to the bus stop on Road 302.
Nobody in Bangladesh plays bowls, so I will have to be satisfied with a spot of goolie ganda when Sarge is not wheezing.
There’s a new daughter-inlaw at number 272 who hangs up the washing like a chorus girl at the Folies Bergère. That should lead me to a heart attack faster than I can spend the hefty pension I’ve been promised if I packed and left this column quietly.
Mostly though, this old, obnoxious emission will be curled up with his unfinished books – Tolstoy’s War and
Peace, which I started in primary school and never got to working out how the Battle of Austerlitz finished.
Then there’s VS Naipaul’s
A House for Mr Biswas, where Mohun’s birth was considered inauspicious as he was born
“in the wrong way” and with an extra finger.
Consider me a fraud as a book reviewer that I have yet to get beyond the first few pages of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or James Joyce’s Ulysses. See you at bookshop some time. Adieu.
Find Higgins on Facebook as The Bookseller of Bangladesh or at Books@antiquecafe in Windermere.