By Dr Satish C Aikant
Author of over 150 books of short stories, novels, poetry, essays, anthologies and books for children, Ruskin Bond turns 91 today. He has been living in his home, the Ivy Cottage, perched on a Mussoorie hillside with windows opening to the sky, the Doon Valley and the Pari Tibba. He is fascinated with small locales and mountains, in particular. The twin cities of Mussoorie and Dehradun have been central to much of his writings and have shaped his creative imagination. Had he been living in the metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai or London he would still be a great writer but perhaps not the kind of writer that he has become. What strikes his readers most is his warm humanity reflected in his narratives, humorous and profound by turns, and his language has the freshness of a mountain spring, spontaneous and unsullied. Some nuggets gleaned from his writings:
Even though I had grown up with a love for the English language and its literature, even though my forefathers were British, Britain was not really my place. I did not belong to the bright lights of Piccadilly and Leicester Square, or, for that matter, to the apple orchards of Kent or the strawberry fields of Berkshire. I belonged, very firmly, to peepal trees and mango groves; to sleepy little towns all over India; to hot sunshine, muddy canals, the pungent smell of marigolds; the hills of home; spicy odours, wet earth after summer rain, neem pods bursting; laughing brown faces; and the intimacy of human contact. (Scenes from a Writer’s Life: A Memoir)
It was while I was living in England, in the jostle and drizzle of London, that I remembered the Himalayas at their most vivid. I had grown up amongst those great blue and brown mountains; they had nourished my blood; and though I was separated from them by thousands of miles of ocean, plains and desert, I could not rid of them from my system. It is always the same with mountains. Once you have lived with them for any length of time, you belong to them. (Journey Down The Years)
Many people are under the impression that I live in splendour in a large mansion, surrounded by secretaries and servants. They are disappointed to find that I live in a tiny bedroom-cum-study and that my living-room is so full of books that there is hardly space for more than three or four visitors at a time. (Roads to Mussoorie)
Life would be intolerable if I did not have the freedom to write every day. Not that everything I put down is worth preserving. A great many pages of manuscript have found their way into my waste-paper basket or into the store that warms the family room on cold winter evenings. I do not always please myself. I cannot always please others because unlike the hard professionals, the Forsyths and the Sheldons, I am not writing to please everyone, I am writing to please myself! (A Time for all Things)
My readership has always been here, and now I can write exclusively for the Indian reader, without having to make the compromises that are often necessary in order to get published in the UK or USA. So away with sensationalism, away with the exotic East, away with maharajas, beggars, spies and shikaris, away with romantic Englishwomen and their far pavilions. No longer do we have to write for the ‘foreign reader.’ (The India I love)
Yet there are times when I do love my art. And because I have loved it, I think I have been able to pass through life without being any man’s slave or tyrant. I doubt if I have ever written a story or essay or workaday article unless I have probably suffered materially, because I have never attempted a blockbuster of a novel, or a biography of a celebrity, or a soap opera that goes on for ever. The prospect of spinning out thousands of words of little or no consequence seems a dull and dreary way of earning a living. (The Lamp Is Lit: Leaves from a Journal)
Being unable to find much comfort or wisdom in the utterances of present-day teachers, preachers, or godmen (be they of the Eastern or Western variety), I frequently turn for advice and reassurance to the early Greek and Roman philosophers – Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and others – those Stoics and Epicureans whose precepts are as relevant today as they were during the finest flowering, of the Greek and Roman civilizations. (The Lamp Is Lit: Leaves from a Journal)
I have never desired fame, and I have never wanted to be the lone, loud man on the summit. I no longer scorn money, but wealth doesn’t interest me very much once my needs and the needs of those who depend on me have been met. I’m happiest just putting pen to paper – writing about a dandelion flowering on a patch of wasteland, and a stunted deaf and mute child I fell in love with; writing about the joys and sorrows and strivings of ordinary folk, and the ridiculous situations in which we sometimes find ourselves. I’m lucky that many readers, both children and adults, have enjoyed what I’ve written. (Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography)
‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable!’ sighed Hamlet in another context, although he might well have been commenting on the values of our own time, which sets more store on a pop singer’s toothbrush or a dead princesss’s wardrobe than on the legacy of the truly great. It’s a world in which we elevate the second rate above the first rate. (A Time for all Things)
Is it just a coincidence that in the so-called developed countries the incidence of mental illness has risen alongside the decline in reading habits and the increase in TV-watching? In the- not- too-distant future, when everyone is glued to a TV set, wearing TV-slippers and eating a TV-supper with a TV husband or wife, perhaps a book will be just another doctor’s prescription for getting back your sanity. At least it’s safe. I have yet to hear of anyone dying from an overdose of reading. (Notes from a Small Room)
I think the best advice I ever had was contained in these lines from Shakespeare which my father had copied into one of my notebooks when I was nine years old: ‘This above all, to thine own self be true.’ (Notes from a Small Room)
The sword is not the weapon, the gun is not the weapon, the bomb is not the weapon, the nuclear device is not the weapon. The only weapon is man. He wields the sword, he fashions the bullet, he pulls the trigger, he primes the bomb, he creates the desire that destroys everything. (Another Day in Landour: Looking Out from My Window)
And here’s my tribute to Ruskin with my humble rhyme:
April, said Eliot, had the cruellest morn,
But May is a blessing when Ruskin, our writer, was born.
The Room on the Roof was a feat at seventeen, no surprise,
It won acclaim and the John Llewellyn Prize.
Rusty has regaled us with his Dehradun raga,
The last we heard was his Magic Mountain saga.
You made Binya with blue umbrella prancing,
And you quietly made way for the Lone Fox Dancing.
Your Trees Still Grow in Dehra, but now they dwindle,
Though interest in chaat waali gali may still kindle.
The small screen was never drab or crusty,
When Doordarshan showed us Ek Tha Rusty.
Star of the silver screen you were courted by all,
Bollywood thrives on your stories for all.
From Shyam Benegal to Vishal Bhardwaj, they all adored you,
From Shabana to Priyanka Chopra, all swooned over you.
Your writing is lucid as a mountain spring grows,
You do not bore us with ponderous prose.
Your Room on the Roof is a magic casement,
Where words come alive with studied enchantment.
Your ghostly tales surpass Kipling’s Phantom Rickshaw,
With haunting echoes that leave us in awe.
Friends in Small Places,
And Friends in Big Places;
Friends in Wild Places,
And Friends in Gentle Places.
All pray for you a life that is happily long,
‘Tramp along the Highway,’ as you sing the Nelson Eddy song.
May your years catch up with the number of your books,
Cross a century and you keep your cherubic looks.
(Dr Satish C Aikant is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, HNB Garhwal University and former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.)
