Booked and How
“I have enjoyed a fairly long life, and in my time I must have
read close to ten thousand books. Many were forgettable, and have been
forgotten. I have also written a few- some forgettable! Now as I enter my
eighties I still read when the light is good and my easy chair well cushioned “
Ruskin Bond
Come May and my attention veers towards the Indian Bond – Ruskin
Bond ( He turned 81 on 19th May, 2015) and his inimitable writing, a
testament to his timeless appeal. His prolific writing has kept us engaged year
after year (and film adaptations of his books like the utterly absorbing Blue
Umbrella). A book cover in sea green strokes lauding a reader’s dream of a
comfy chair in a quiet corner surrounded by a leafy plant or two, a pile of
favourite reads, a furry canine curled up under the chair, and a title in muted
red - ‘Love among the Bookshelves’ released last
year. It became identifiable in its own right as it straddles the genres of memoir
writing and anthology both in one book. An unsurprising feat indeed given the
writer’s repertoire.
Right in the
beginning, he puts all speculations at rest by disclosing that the book is not
about any torrid clandestine love affair among the bookshelves but his lifelong
romance with the printed word, a loneliness, depressive-driven engagement with books and authors which fermented into
sparkling wine of flowing words that continues unabated. “As a boy reading was
my religion. It helped me to discover my soul. Later writing helped me to
record its journey.” He hails the short story saying that when time and
changing fads absorb and consume many fine writers of long fiction, short story
gets picked up by anthologies and may
get selected again and again and thus have a long life keeping the author alive
and vibrant long after he is gone.
A forest
officer’s hoard of books in a rest house in the jungle, amidst a hunting party
with guns, dense foliage and shadows of lurking animals became his first date
with the treasure house, catapulting him on a long road of classics, ghost
stories, crime fiction, comics and the short stories. Every chapter in two
parts is a peek first into his anecdotal personal story of growing up in a
boarding school in Shimla, Dehradun, and later
Channel Islands and London; followed by an interface with an author and
an excerpt from one of his books. There
are the usual suspects among his favourites - Dickens, Wodehouse and Maugham
but also some others not so famous but precious like Bates and Jeffries.
Amongst Wodehouse’ great comic creations (Jeeves and Bertie
Wooster, Lord Emsworth, Mr Milliner, the Drones club), Ukridge was one of
Wodehouse’s most delightful creations in his earlier works (Wodehouse lived a
long life beginning with Queen
Victoria’s reign, through Edward VII, George V, George VI and Queen Elizabeth
II). A scamster with endless streams of making a fortune with despairing
outcomes, he endeared himself to the growing-up Bond in school who turned to
him through a disastrous climate of ‘quarrelling parents, disapproving
relatives and censorious schoolmates.’ An excerpt from Love among the Chickens
takes the reader through a never-never land of eternal sunshine, eccentric men
and supercilious businessmen, to Wodehouse the master of comical refrain in
impeccable English prose.
When in a lighter mood, he would browse through his favourite
comic collection. Superheroes ruled the roost but his inclination towards
British comic publications, like Beano, The Dandy and Champion assuage many a
guilty reader’s heart directing him to plain fun for fun‘s sake (the
breakthroughs like Maus, and Kari today completely subvert that feeling
establishing the comic world as a rare must-visit genre of reading).
H.E. Bates’ short story collections which were then
serialized in the The Strand magazine, never failed to amaze him. Bond’s long
pursuit of short story (five hundred stories to Bates six hundred) can be
attributed in part to his admiration of Bates art. His long story about
Alexander and his love for the countryside in some way definitely sowed the
seeds for Bond’s passion for nature. An excerpt from Great Uncle Crow
authenticates the impression it must have had on a young mind of Bond’s
disposition (Bond compares the tenderness and beauty of his writing to a Renoir
painting).
“Today, teachers and parents and the world at large complain
that the reading habit is dying out, that youngsters don’t read, that no one
wants books. Well, all I can say is that they never did. If reading is a
minority pastime today, it was even more so sixty years ago. And there was no
television, then, no internet, no Facebook, no DVD players, none of the
distractions we blame today for the decline in the reading habit.” Reading the above passage in the book was a
revelation to me and food for thought at our next Goa Writers meet.
The compelling writer with an austere, without frills,
unsentimental style – Somerset Maugham
introduced Bond to adult fiction. His book Cakes and Ale, a thinly veiled
portrait of Thomas Hardy and his effervescent wife Rosie, was a rage with the
older boys in the dormitories of his school. He says that it appeals to him
still with its freshness and zeal. But the writer to take away the trophy for
the umpteenth times is Charles Dickens. “In a wonderful voice he could, by turn
be Micawber, or Sam Weller, or Scrooge, or Marley’s ghost. What a face is his
to meet in a drawing room! It has the life and soul in it of fifty human
beings.” Reading David Copperfield, he decided emphatically that he was going
to be a writer. “And in a single-minded determined, Dickensian sort of way, I
became one, for whom literature was religion.”
An excerpt chosen by Bond from The Story of My Heart by
Richard Jeffries in the end makes the book what it is - Love among the
Bookshelves. A book that can help a human being discover his soul, its vastness
and unity with all that exists and does not exist – the visible and invisible
world. Where time and space is meaningless and stardust, the oceans, sky, earth
and a blade of grass coalesce and flow together as one stream. And this well
thumbed book copy now 50 years old, held together by Sellotape and adhesives
still lives with him talking to him and being a friend forever and ever.
