Requiem for a Wren - a love story
What I mean is, the story of my love for the book :)
I first read 'Requiem for a Wren' in early 90's when I came upon it among my father's books in his paternal home, when looking for something I could read - in those days, in the places we lived or visited, books were rather hard to come by. I was in my later teens, and exploring Dad's books in search of reading material [that is how I came to love MacLean and Perry Mason - he had a big collection of those from his (relative) youth!]. It was perhaps bought in 1974, and apparently gifted to an aunt, a cousin of my dad, by a friend. How it came to Dad, neither of us knows now.
Well, to put it briefly, I was completely blown away by it. So much so, that when this was submerged in flood waters for a week (among several other treasures, most of which could not be salvaged), I rescued it, scraped off the mud, and dried it keeping newspaper sheets between each set of pages, and got the edges re-cut by a book-binder. This is why the cover is missing and the date is smudged. Since then, I have read it thrice, and cried every single time.
Later, when I graduated and started working, I desperately looked for a new copy. It was the pre-internet era, and foreign books were impossible to procure. Even after the internet became accessible, and subsequently online bookstores came into the picture, this book wasn't available in India for a long time. After years of searching, I got a friend from US to buy it (and she could only find a used copy), and get it to me on one of her visits here. However, the original one is still so precious to me, that I haven't had the heart to discard it.
Later, when I graduated and started working, I desperately looked for a new copy. It was the pre-internet era, and foreign books were impossible to procure. Even after the internet became accessible, and subsequently online bookstores came into the picture, this book wasn't available in India for a long time. After years of searching, I got a friend from US to buy it (and she could only find a used copy), and get it to me on one of her visits here. However, the original one is still so precious to me, that I haven't had the heart to discard it.
The two paragraphs of a poem quoted in the beginning completely enticed me. They held such a pain, and a mystery, of a lost or elusive love, that I read them over and over, and these lines are embedded in my mind and heart forever. Several years later, I was able to find the complete poem - The Triumph of Time, which is something of a saga. It has several beautiful thoughts and lines, but these two paras remain my favorite.
This is what the cover of the original one looked like:
And this is how the cover of my (new) copy looks:
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