An anthology of love stories with a jacket of typically pink butterflies is where I first met Ruskin Bond. While most grew up with his stories at bedtime, I found him in my twenties, but instantly knew this was a man after my own heart—a writer of love in little places, joy tucked away in tree folds and peace within the mountains. To the abundance of his repertoire, this year added two new works — Tales of Fosterganj (Aleph) and Love Among the Bookshelves (Penguin). Tales ... is classic Bond stuff: a writer wanders into the tiny town of Fosterganj expecting quiet but finds quaint stories of a man-eating tiger, ‘magic manhood oil’, and many more mysteries, intertwined into the land’s tapestry.
Love Among the Bookshelves , was an altogether different treat. As Bond disclaims in the foreword, this is no tale of raunchy doings, but is the love story of his lifelong tryst with books. In five chapters, he gives the reader a panoramic view of his changing literary diet of over 10,000 books, drawing parallels between him and the writers that made him. I read Tales... and Love… simultaneously and it felt like mist lifting off a mind you only foggily knew before.
As an eight-year-old, Bond found P.G. Wodehouse in the cleft of a forest rest house wall and discovered a writer of crackling sentences, with a penchant for permanent sunniness, something one could say of Bond too. Through the sorrow of losing a father, the loneliness of boarding school and the trials of jumping jobs alone in the UK, Bond read classics, comics and genre fiction, finding escape and even seeing the world through fiction-tinted eyes. From H.E. Bates, he cultivated sensitivity for humanity, from Somerset Maugham he took the art of ‘unsentimental realism’, and from Dickens he drew determination. It is in the final chapter on Richard Jefferies’ lyrical, poetic prose that one sees, that what Jefferies does for the English countryside, is what Bond, in his nature-soaked, metaphor-laden, lush writing, does for India’s small towns.
There’s a case here to be made for books about writers’ favourite books. Last year, Pradeep Sebastian and Chandra Siddan edited 50 Writers, 50 Books (HarperCollins) that asked 50 Indian authors to write about a definitive work of Indian fiction, and the result, when devoured at once, is a splendid overview of India’s widely-varied literary landscape. While mostly preoccupied with our articulation of modernity and language, each essay offers an insight into how writers read. Many of the authors and the works they addressed were new to me, but I now dip back every once in a while after reading someone new to see if I know them any better. On one such excursion, I read Anjum Hasan on Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, a book that transformed my perspectives in college. I was fresh from Hasan’s short-story collection Difficult Pleasures , still revelling from the whisky shot of warmth each piece left me with, and here I found her indebted to Ghosh for instilling in her the power of fiction’s possibilities. It was just another link in the curious chain of literary inheritance.
