Of musty old books

I enjoy much more rummaging (well, gently) among the piles of old books on the pavements than going through new titles in prestigious bookshops. The latter, one has, in many cases, read about in reviews. So one buys them in order to further strengthen one's point of view in an on-going debate. But the rummaging, usually not very fruitful, sometimes throws up a bundle of yellow pages that causes excitement one does not expect after a certain age. Sometime back, I chanced upon Mirza Barkhurdar's Mahbub-al-Quloob on a hot morning in Anarkali. It was printed by Naval Kishore in Lahore around 1914.And in spite of being didactic, it is interesting, consisting of hundreds of stories pieced together. However, its prose suffers from ostentatious style and studied ornamentation typical of South Asia's Persian prose. I don't know but it must have been painful to read a story in which the description of human emotions is only incidental to the exhibition of one's mastery of the language.