The Hindu Business Line : Simply Bond

It is an enchanting collection of travel tales that weave a magic web around you. Very, very different from the usual travelogues, Ruskin Bond's latest offering — Tales of the Open Road — takes you to small and unknown places, with their dusty roads or rain-washed streets; the mountain streams and the odd dwelling in the mountains, as well as to awesome places like Gangotri, and of course numerous drives down ghat roads in all kinds of vehicles.

Disarmingly, the author says: "As I do not drive, I am the ideal person to have in the front seat; I repose complete confidence in the man behind the wheel." Including the time he almost fell off, along with his friend's ancient Fiat car's door, while taking a short cut through the Rajaji Sanctuary, getting an "uninterrupted view of the wildlife in the sanctuary"!

Simply, and yet effectively, he puts across his point of view. When his criticism of the growing traffic on Uttaranchal's ghat roads is explained by saying it's good for the State's economy. "I quieten down then, but I wonder at the great speed at which they move. People come seeking nature and new experiences but have no interest in the world outside."

Dreaming of the day he'd be able to drive on the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawar, Bond pays a tribute to the ubiquitous highway truck driver: "More than the railwayman, the truck driver is modern India's lifeline, and yet his life is held cheap. He drinks, he swears, occasionally he picks up HIV, and frequently he is killed or badly injured. But we cannot do without him."

Giving a delightful account of the taxi driver who terrorised everybody on the road with his loud horn, the author dwells on the virtue of silence in prose that is sweeter than poetry. "The sweetest sound of all, I decided, was silence. There are many kinds of silence — the silence of an empty room, the silence of the mountains, the silence of prayer, or the enforced silence of loneliness — but the best kind of silence, I concluded, was the silence that comes after the cessation of noise." But that does not deter him from taking over from the driver the task of blowing the horn whenever necessary, disgusting the third passenger in the car!

An endearing feature of Bond's writing is his gentle criticism, laced with humour to soften the blow... reminiscent of Jane Austen's style of writing. But sometimes he can be harsh; like when describing the adventures of Frederick `pahari' Wilson, who came to Garhwal in the 1850s, attracted by the valuable timber. He introduced the apple to this region — "the `Wilson apples'... large, red and juicy" — and acquired "encyclopaedic knowledge of the wildlife there, and "his articles were later plundered by so-called wildlife experts for their own writings"!

Whether it is the "icy womb" of the Ganga, or a ride in the tonga, Bond's ability to pick out the smallest detail makes the reader his travel companion. Describing the fall of the Ganga at Gauri Kund, he says: "A night spent beside the river, within sound of the fall, is an eerie experience. After some time it begins to sound, not like one fall, but a hundred, and this sound permeates both one's dreams and waking hours."

While others might get excited about the region's gulabi thand (`rosy cold', as he puts it), even though he finds this "a charming expression, I prefer a rosy sunburn — and remained beneath a heavy quilt until the sun came up to throw its golden shafts across the river."

But the most delightful chapter of the book — and it's easy to see why; it brings out the best in this delightful writer for children — is `Running away' where as a schoolboy he runs away from his hostel, to join Uncle Jim's ship that had sailed into Jamnagar. The truant boy, we discover, had reason enough. "I was sick of school and sick of my guardian. But that was not all. I was in love with the world. I wanted to see the world, every corner of it, the places I had read about in books — the junks and sampans of Hong Kong, the palm-fringed lagoons of the Indies, the streets of London, the beautiful ebony-skinned people of Africa, the bright birds and exotic plants of the Amazon... " The pages that follow make an enchanting read, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn. As it "isn't much fun running away on your own", he takes along for company, and courage, his friend Daljeet, a sound decision, as he discovers later.

Their early morning walk down the mountain road, the milk-less tea sweetened by several spoons of sugar, their telling the dhabawalla that they are not schoolboys but "tourists", and the latter terrorising them by saying how every year two or three boys run away, but always get caught... are all a virtual treat. In this book Bond reminds us once again the delightful and unsurpassable virtue of simple prose. It is his special skill that makes it appear effortless.

Just as he can convey the sublime while discussing the humble tonga, and how many tonga drivers have traded their pony for an auto rickshaw... "The greater the distance we put between our world and the world of animals, the less human we become."

More Stories on : Books | Browser's Corner

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Hot breads

Entering the big league