The
quintessential Bond stories are to be read in long train journeys that most
Indian families take annually when the schools close for summer. Summer in
India is not just monotonously long days with heat waves; it is one of the most
beautiful times of the year, with cassias and flames of the forest bursting in
a riot of bright colours, with the ice-candy man matching his gastronomic
treats to the vibrant summer hues, kite flying during the days as much as mango
stealing, star gazing at nights where meteors shoot past delivering wishes like
postmen who bring love from old friends and pen pals and even the much
cherished mango showers with its thunder and deep rumbling. It is a festive
time of sorts and new friendships are to be made with books and authors.
When I
was growing up, the staple of my summer holidays was an issue each of Tinkle
and Amar
Chitra Katha during these famed train journeys (that I would finish
very quickly to the deep consternation of my father) and the occasional Champak.
Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha are Indian comics while Champak is a literary
magazine in English and Hindi for young readers. I did come across the beautiful mountain
stories of Ruskin Bond, that Anglophone writer from the Himalayas who wrote
poignantly, the angst of adolescent life amidst an indifferent adult world and
a deeply empathetic natural world. The Chirs
and Pines, the railways, the cottages with cherry trees, the languid town
of the hill people- all of this was an
alien exotic land for the sea breeze loving beach going ‘plains’ girl that I
was.
The best of Bond came when he was just
seventeen, fresh out of a public school and on his way out of India into the
world. He carried the Himalayan town with him and while abroad at his aunt’s in
Channel Islands for a year, working and going to the movies every day. He went
back to his memories of friendship and his earliest literary encounters in
India to quell his loneliness elsewhere. In the year he spent as a civil
servant at the Island and thereafter in London, he always roamed quietly like
the leopard of Kasauli, restless and fretting inside, while darting about from
one island of solitude to another. He wrote The Room on the Roof,
that was kindly encouraged by his editor and it went on to win the prestigious
John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for the best first book by a writer under
thirty.
Ruskin
Bond lived the rest of his sixty years until this day, writing to pay his
bills, just like the other writer who the same editor introduced to the world-
V.S. Naipaul. He has over 500 works to his credit, an oeuvre that includes
poetry, short stories, novellas and essays all filled with his delightful
vantage point and his impish humour. His latest book Love Among the Bookshelves
speaks fondly about his early literary influences with excerpts from his
favourite authors. It is a glimpse into the adventures of a bookish boy who
skipped sports in school to read and wrote stories only to be flogged. The
banality of the adults around him only spurred him on to more adventures with
Wodehouse and Bates, a stock of British fiction, comics and classics that he
goes back to this day. A rare account of
his London days and Channel island days add a wonderful background to the works
and foreground to a stunning career of over forty books for children alone.
The
illustrated verse volume Hip Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems
is a joy to read. It has poems on
animals, birds and trees, on love, loss and longing, on peace and collective
aspirations of humanity. Of course, ghosts haunt a few pages and truants play
in the bright morning sun. It seems as if Bond would dream with such tenacity
that the world would change with the sheer force of his words. In his poem ‘IF
Mice Could Roar’, he says
‘If a
tortoise could run
And
losses be won,
And
bullies be buttered on toast;
If a
song brought a shower
And a
gun grew a flower,
This
world would be nicer than most!’
Such a
flight with poetry to reclaim happiness and beauty, childhood and innocence,
silence and solitude and summers with love and books is within our reach now.
