Dear Ruskin Bond watches over my writing desk as I start with these words. In a black-and-white photograph that Murthy of Bengaluru’s very old and famous Select Book Shop gave me to keep years ago, Bond looks down — it is a low-angle shot — with two books and a rolled file in his hands, which are resting on his stomach. The shop and half its signboard are behind him. The beloved author looks like he was about to smile but the photographer clicked a millisecond before that. For years the ageing photograph, undated, remained within my journals.

Now it occupies a place on the wall alongside several other pieces of paper, Post-its with reminders and whatnots. I try my best to avoid the reminders, but Bond catches my eye now and again.

I recently finished reading Bond’s autobiography, Lone Fox Dancing , and am now meant to write my words on him, and it. I falter, I gloriously procrastinate, read other books, look up things like how many characters there are in War and Peace and what the seedcake kiss in Ulysses means — things I don’t really need to know right this minute — because, frankly, it is a bit intimidating, writing about Bond. How do you write about someone whom everyone feels they have a familiar, familial claim to? There will undoubtedly be a lot I will have to leave out — herein comes my worry about all the things that I will end up not saying.

Bond and his writings have meant different things to different people, articulated variously — ever so often — as memoirs, travelogues to Landour, where he lives, anecdotes, and chance meetings. He has inspired several generations of readers and writers over a career spanning six-something decades. I find something appropriate, which I paraphrase here: At this point there is so much about (Bond) that it’s difficult to tell which of it matters, and how much. It all sort of cancels itself out (…) even writing about your own feeling and reaction (…) feels extraneous and unnecessary. Didn’t someone already say, in much better words, exactly what you want to say?

But one gets over oneself and attempts anyway. Bond’s effect on how I read and what I write has been, like his writings, sometimes subtle, sometimes sublime, even subversive; I am still working it all out in my head.

My grandfather was a freedom fighter-Communist-card-holder-doctor. He read a lot. I never met him because he passed away six months, nearly to the day, before I was born. I got to know him, ‘meet him’, through the large collection of books he left behind and which, with no one else claiming it, I got to inherit. Bond’s books were not a part of his collection, but in the simplistic annals of childhood memories, it all meshes into the same thing.

****

It was in the hills, where I grew up, that I first chanced upon a Bond book. The walks he went on were relatable to the walks around town and to the library and elsewhere that I had gotten used to taking. The birds and flowers he wrote about were relatable because the ones we had in this part of the country, far-far from the Himalayas, though not same-same, were still pretty and colourful and in plenty. We were also a generation blessed with the wild imagination of the pre-screentime era, so we could imagine pines and sorrel, nettle and other unfamiliar things by giving them our own understood shapes and colours. Yearning for my grandfather and jealous of the time the older cousins had had with him, if his books were my connection with him, Bond became the grandfatherly figure who instructed how to walk the hills and notice the flowers and birds and other dancing things. Perhaps that is why I find myself returning to their books — one of them who wrote, the other who read and collected — again and again. Bond’s books feel like a homecoming.

As sweet luck would have it, I happen to be back in the hills when I begin reading Lone Fox Dancing . It feels right that I am here. Throughout the autobiography I cannot shake off the feeling that it hints at a swansong, from his Dedication and Acknowledgements page onward to “the evening of a long and fairly fulfilling life. And it is late evening in Landour”. It closes on a late evening with a small boy bringing the author fresh apricots that are “still very sour, very tangy, but full of promise”.

In the pages in between, Bond lays out a life “journey that has gone on for eighty-three years, sixty-seven of these spent writing”.

***

For a fan of Bond’s books, the autobiography is a bit like being shown how the magician manages to pull the hare out of his hat every single night. Bond lays out incidents, anecdotes, inspirations and memories of a lifetime, several of which he has turned into some of his best-loved stories. That he was born in Kasauli, that the years he spent with his father in Delhi were the best in his life, that he was a misfit when he had to live with his mother, stepfather and their children, that he was in England for a brief four years before India became too hard a pull to resist, that he settled in the hills and never left them for too long... these are all as familiar to his fans as is his penchant for nursing sick plants to health, his love for a good walk and the small room with a large window that is his workspace. There are lovely photographs in the book from these periods of his life, for added pleasure. The humour is characteristically subtle, quiet and, all too often, poignant, emotional. He is perhaps more willing to be vulnerable here than he has ever been, even though several passages have been published earlier either as is, or interpreted into short essays or added on as passages in his short stories.

The book, like the man himself, feels familiar, and quiet — two qualities I keep repeating in my head. Quiet is, as I have always remembered, the effect his work has had on me, a slow breeze filled with the fragrance of the flowers of the mountain, carrying a mix of bird calls, stray conversation, dog bark and undersong.

Then there are stories that can only be called sensual, sexual; of restlessness, of the discoveries of youth, of love affairs, “…there were loves; some unrequited, some mutual and intense… and a few will not be spoken of, for some passions are private, and the world is no poorer not knowing them.”

There are writings that aren’t exactly children’s literature, which he is a lot famous for. The image of Bond as the benevolent grandfather figure endures though, and takes precedence over the romantic that he continues to see himself as. This popular representation of him, padded on — sorry! — by panegyric essays such as this, is one that he finds odd enough to mention several times during the book.

He wonders if honeymooners — “some of the most frequent visitors to my humble flat” — ask for his blessings because they are under the impression that he has been a celibate man, “and the blessings of sexually innocent adults are believed to be potent.”

It is an image he seems to have only half-heartedly tried to shake off though. It perhaps hasn’t helped that his writings have always captured the innocence and the uninhibited joy of revelling in nature. Also that he has retained that childlike curiosity, appreciation of, and love for, the beauty of birds and animals and trees and well-walked paths and flowers and friends and a good time.

****

In a world that hurries along, reading a Bond essay feels like a time-out, a reminder that it is perfectly good to stop a while and look around. Quite literally a cartoon by Kim Casali — ‘Love Is…’ stopping to smell the roses. Perhaps this is why his writing appeals to a wide age spectrum: for children, it is a revision of the natural world they are familiar with, thus relatable; and for the adults, it is about looking back to what they remember as a simpler time. That old romanticised Ideal. Nostalgia is a potent drink, after all.

Given how much of Bond’s life experiences have lent themselves to his writing, directly or otherwise, Lone Fox Dancing often serves to fill the gaps, joining the dots to reveal how all of it transpired and in what order. An extra touch of poignancy hops along for the ride. There is plenty of material still for him to mine, you can sense.

He writes of science and politics letting us down, but then notices that “the cricket still sings on the window-sill”. The hoarder of words hasn’t tired of the two windows in his room, the windows that have yielded him stories from the other side for decades, for different generations now.

“I am happiest just putting pen to paper — writing about a dandelion flowering on a patch of wasteland…”

Deepa Bhasthiis a writer and the editor of ‘The Forager’, an online journal of food politics

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW