It is a project somebody has to take up: to map how Ruskin Bond finalises the anthologies of his previously published writings, how his stories find themselves in volume after volume in different combinations, often along with newly published work or forewords. A more difficult task perhaps would be figuring out how it is that in each different combination, the reader has the sense of coming to his work afresh, even with the suspicion that in the new combination the story has somehow changed.
Mussoorie’s most famous resident certainly kept the presses buzzing in 2017. In Small Towns, Big Stories: New and Selected Fiction, for instance, he included two of his most popular stories, ‘The Night Train to Deoli’ and ‘Time Stops at Shamli’. These stories, he says in the introduction, were written when he was in his twenties, calling the 1950s his “romantic” period “as far as stories went”. The Deoli he wrote about, he says, was just a a place in his mind, but he later went on to discover that “there were at least five Deolis in India — one in Rajasthan, one in Maharashtra, one in Orissa, and two in Madhya Pradesh!” It perhaps needs an enterprising soul to draw up the Deoli literary tour.
He explains here, as he done previously too on many occasions, that he has found his best material in small towns: “Although I spent three years in London, and five in New Delhi, those great cities never gave me much by way of stories. It is easier to know people in small places. Sometimes you can’t help knowing them.”
Bond also co-edited a collection of writings on the Himalayas last year, along with Namita Gokhale, called Himalaya: Adventures, Meditations, Life. It’s has wide-ranging contributions, but it is his own, ‘A Night in a Garhwal Village’, that is the most riveting. It is a nudge, if any is needed, to go back to my favourite Bond book, Rain in the Mountains.
But 2017 was a landmark year for the writer. Though he has written about his personal life story at many places, there is scattered-ness (in the best sense of the term) to it. In the year just past he finally gave a more cohesive account, Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography. It covers his early life and the decision to finally settle in the Mussoorie hills. If there’s one book from 2017 that you must catch up on in the early days of 2018, let this be the one.
