JK PANORAMA LATEST ISSUE

NIGHT FLIGHT
(The more the cost is passed on, the higher it becomes – but pay someone must)
Shantiveer Kaul
Certain things have an afterlife. And
certain a life after. It is in the latter
category that leaves or flower petals
pressed in the pages of books and certain books
themselves fall. In early seventies of the
century gone by when Sartre and Camus had
already been deconstructed, in a manner of
speaking, in our mind's eye – suddenly Andre
Gide, who was their senior, began to fascinate
us. In our trilingual minds pace, where Urdu
and Kashmiri occupied equal salience and
Iqbal, Ghalib, Faiz and Manto were discussed
as animatedly as Akhtar, Nadim, Kamil and
Rahi, there was something awe-inspiring
about the authors from shores afar who came to
us enveloped in the heady smell of some exotic
paper crackling like fresh currency notes
directly off the shelves of Kashmir Book Shop.
A visit to the bookshop was a rarely missed
ritual and a new arrival would cause feverish
excitement and the news of that arrival would
go around a group of people very quickly
indeed. So, it was the time when we would be
discussing the ideas of Ayn Rand in the
University Campus that an old French writer
made an appearance on the
bookshelves of Kashmir Book
Shop. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
had written the book 'Night Flight'
in 1931 and it had shortly become an
i n t e r n a t i o n a l b e s t s e l l e r .
Incidentally, Gide wrote the
foreword to its first edition. In 1932
it was translated into English by
Stuart Gilbert and the next year –
1933 – turned into a movie starring
Clark Gable. It was recreated in an
Italian opera in 1940 and continued
to be printed in modest numbers for
many years in editions in French,
English and several other languages
it was translated into. The book had enjoyed a
fair run of success and almost completed its
life cycle without being classified as a classic.
However, it appeared that in the early 70s the
book, Gilbert's translation of it in particular,
got another lease of life internationally and
also in Kashmir. Suddenly it became de
rigueur to read or appear to have read it.
The book is about the night flight of an
mail carrying aircraft of Patagonia Mail which
anor
14 AUGUST 2017 P a
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