Book review: 'Classic Ruskin Bond Vol 2: The Memoirs'

Book: Classic Ruskin Bond Vol 2: The Memoirs
Author: Ruskin Bond
Publisher: Penguin Books
Pages: 766
Price: Rs499

Some dismiss him as an inconsequential writer without a significant international presence. Others regard Ruskin Bond’s books as a comfortable habit they have no intentions of growing out of. Belonging to neither group are those, including myself, who have meant to read him, but invariably deferred their good intentions, reassuring themselves that Bond will always be there and always writing. Surely he can wait.

Whichever camp you belong to, you can’t help but baulk at the size of Classic Ruskin Bond Volume 2 , a compilation of five anthologies of his autobiographical writings —”Rain in the Mountains”, “Scenes from a Writer’s Life”, “The Lamp Is Lit”, “Landour Days” and “Notes from a Small Room”. With little exposure to his work, other than the odd essay or anecdote and, more recently, The Room on the Roof (the award-winning largely autobiographical debut novel Bond had written at the age of 17), I was not confident about enjoying this writer who had sustained both his productivity and appeal over the decades when pre-release publicity was unheard of.

I grimly got down to the task at hand, not realising that Classic Ruskin Bond Volume 2 would take me unawares and become an addiction. The reflections, essays, anecdotes and poems swept me into quintessential Bond country. I found myself eagerly sharing the author’s joy in the little things, like the first ladybird of the season on his windowsill; his sadness over events like his father’s premature death when Bond was ten; his lament over the vanishing forests and the birds that inhabited them; his amusement at being mistaken for writer Enid Blyton, and his indignation over the violation of his privacy.

Above all, I enjoyed his quirky sense of humour, laughing out loud at his description of certain episodes that reminded me of one of his favourite writers, Jerome K. Jerome.  My favourite is the one involving the printers’ gaffe in a book for which the author had written an introduction. Under Bond’s photograph is the following caption: “Dreaded man-eater after it was shot.”

As is inevitable with an anthology containing such a vast body of work, there is some overlapping of material and several typos. But they don’t matter. When Bond describes a destination — like his beloved Garhwal, for example — it ceases to be a place on the map and becomes a beautiful portrait of life itself. You can feel how precious this world – with its mountains and valleys, rivers and cascades, animals, birds, insects and plants — is to the author. Seen through Bond’s eyes, the morning sun comes “shouting over the rooftops”, while the whistling-thrush is “Fred Astaire dancing in top hat and tails”. The hills are alive with the sweetness of birdsong, the thunder of waterfalls, the sizzle of lightning and even the sound of silence. They are home to a people whose dignity and sense of humour are admirable in the face of poverty and hardship. As an acquaintance of Bond writes, “Once the mountains are in your blood, there is no escape.”

Reading this volume, it’s easy to see why Bond is so beloved as a children’s author. His obsessions cover phantoms, historical events and the graves of the long-forgotten, including the Rani of Jhansi’s British lawyer. Bond’s world, despite its extraordinary beauty, is not an idyllic one. There’s murder and violence too, as his research on the Raj era reveals, as well as the tragedy of separations both personal, like his father’s death, and impersonal, like his account of Partition, which forced his friend Omar from the North-West Frontier Province of undivided India, to find his moorings in an unknown destination in Pakistan. Years later, Omar returned to the country where he grew up, but in a Pakistani Air Force plane when war broke out between the two neighbours; only to be shot down over Indian territory.

For budding writers, this book offers a treat: a part of Bond’s correspondence with Diana Athill, editor at Andre Deutsch, who published his first novel. A more affectionate, compassionate and self-effacing editor I can’t imagine. Sometimes, a writer gets the editor he deserves and this seems to apply to Bond, who is loving, compassionate, humble and charmingly endearing. “Among writers,” he declares in “The Lamp Is Lit”, “I am not one of the big guns. I am not even a little gun. I’m just a pebble lying on the beach. But I like to think that I’m a smooth, round, colourful pebble… that someone will…put…in his…pocket. Could you be that wanderer by the sea? I shall nestle there, close to you. I shall try to make you feel better.”

He has done so in more ways than he realises.