Reading Ruskin Bond's autobiography feels exactly like listening to stories told by a favourite grandpa by the fire on a cold winter evening. This is a cosy book, a book to curl up under the covers with. Like the best of grandpa's yarns, this story does not handle life with kid gloves. There are monsters in the periphery, there is death and heartbreak; there is also comfort and hope, wonder and delight. Its warmth radiates from the author's personality. His mellow voice cocoons the reader in a dream of forgotten times and places and people. Ripeness, in this case, is truly all.
Bond's autobiography is as detailed as it is selective. The author almost completely ignores the minutiae of life after 30 as he zooms back and forth between past restlessness and present content. He tells the story of his life with the same grace, charm and simplicity that he brings to his tales of imaginary people. Stories of the young Bond in Jamnagar gleefully bringing home a crab for a pet from the seafront or being administered 'Grandma's Enema' in Dehradun read like the adventures of Rusty. The intensity of his love for his father and his untimely loss become the frame within which the book is woven. Unforgettable grief shapes this telling of enriching connections between human beings and the natural world.
Bond relates the inevitable, and welcome, solitariness of the writerly life with the dancing fox he once saw in Mussoorie. It gave him a poem then and becomes this book's ruling metaphor: "Sometimes, when words ring true,/ I'm like a lone fox dancing/ In the morning dew." Dancing through the thickets of memory, the lone fox pauses to examine interesting people, places and relationships. The narrative begins with his birth (the infant Bond engagingly recreated from family accounts) and stops with the founding of his adoptive Pahari family in Landour. A childhood both pampered and neglected, a restless youth and a mellow old age are crafted through anecdotes and nicely-reproduced photographs: some joyous, some poignant, all deeply moving. These spots of time hang like bright jewels in a sepia landscape, imparting to the overall picture both texture and meaning.
The author has lived through some tumultuous times in the history of the country and the world. He engages with these historical changes by showing how they impinged on a sheltered life. It is easy to dismiss Bond's political disinterestedness as apathy, but this hides a deep concern for the world coupled with an awareness of the insignificance of human life. Bond's 50-year-long relationship with the Himalayas has moulded this book as much as his philosophy. The book provides its own perfect summation: "I'm afraid," ends the author, "science and politics have let us down. But the cricket still sings on the window-sill."
