Friday 2 May 2014

Bond With The Best




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.