Life’s Magic Moments!
The phrase itself is quintessentially fairy tale-like, almost compelling you to pause for a bit and take in the world around you. Shut your eyes and you will be transported to the days of your childhood, of warm summer afternoons coated with sunshine, of autumn evenings by the lake, and of Sunday lunch with your family and loved ones.
Magic moments, moments that live forever, eternally shrouded by nostalgia, always evoking a deep sense of both dissatisfaction and peace. Peace because you know those days were some of the best, and easiest, you will ever have. Dissatisfaction because you also know you can never live them again. And the middle ground, a little bit of both, for you are now in the in-between, in the sense of just after and right before, knowledgeable of the past and always uncertain of the future. And so, in the present is where you must find life’s magic moments, caught between your daily commute to work, dropping your kids off at school, at the local bazaar haggling over fish prices. There are magic moments in the mundane, too — as long as you ramble, as long as you amble, as long as you tumble down life’s winding paths, ever trodden, ever exciting — never alike.
That is the crux of Ruskin Bond’s newest book, aptly named the same — Life’s Magic Moments, a beautiful ‘ramble’ along the tender, delicate, fragile, yet constant, beauties of human existence. An ode to geraniums, musings on his three-legged family cat Mimi. An afternoon by the banks of a crystal spring, pure enough to drink unfiltered from. Earthworms and flowers and the streets of Mussoorie that have grown more crowded since when he first started to live there. His fondness for books, for literature that has been his constant companion; literature that ought to be everyone’s constant companion, for it tells one one is not alone. That whatever one feels and thinks and does has all been felt and thought and done before, by people who have left records of it for one’s perusal long after they are gone. Literature that reaches out to him between the covers of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and teaches him to ‘deal with loneliness and understand solitude’, literature left behind by Tagore and Jonson, and the literature he himself has left behind and continues to leave behind in the world.
Magic moments from his own life, drawing from his cheerful disposition and optimism, literature in which he records his child-like wonder with infinite grace, even today, nearly 70 years after his first novel was published.
Ruskin Bond turns 91 today, but the book, if you were to hold it in your hand, reads like the journal of an impossibly wise child first discovering the world, writing of all it sees with marvel, with contentment, with joy, and an almost impossibly endearing love that makes each paragraph precious. There are no long sermons or philosophical enquiries, no anger or dissatisfaction expressed, no enormous clumps of memory written about in mournful refrains. It acts instead as the soul itself of the human condition, welcoming and aware of only one thing: to be at one with the world, to love and understand the blessings it gives us, and ask nothing in return.
I first met Ruskin Bond, my parents tell me, when I was very young, still in the single digits and with an impossibly high opinion of myself because I was already reading books my peers couldn’t even pronounce the names of (brat behaviour, I agree, but I am no longer like that). The Crossword Bookstore on Elgin Road was still around back then, and I was rummaging through the fiction section upstairs for my next conquest when suddenly a large crowd of children my age gathered in a circle in an open space on the floor. Eager-looking parents mulled around anxiously, some holding copies of books and others telling their kids to act smart and not interrupt what was to follow. Soon enough, a most amiable-looking, distinguished gentleman descended upon the gathering, all smiles and silvery hair and a sense of humour that had everyone relaxed and laughing in next to no time, telling stories and reading aloud from a newly-published book, signing a few copies himself and offering warm hugs to kids if they were brave enough to ask. I went home that day clutching my brand-new copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but that was also the first time I met one of the many authors I respect and look up to enormously, even today.
There is always a golden mist covering your recollections of childhood, and for me, Ruskin Bond is certainly that; that evening at Crossword, though blurry in my mind now, is a story that is reserved for the dining table at my parents’ house, still. The first Bond book I read was Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, thanks to my father, and over the years, my perusal of his works has expanded, as has the veritable literary empire he has built all by himself.
I have much clearer recollections of my being in Mr Bond’s benign presence in 2019. Literaria, the literature fest of St Xavier’s College, which I was attending as a representative of my own batch from the Jadavpur University Department of English. I remember that year clearly, since it was the last before Covid, and I was a wide-eyed first-year student, just starting to dip my toes in the vast waters of the subject. And, of course, I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to get to listen to him speak. I still remember him walking into Fr Depelchin Auditorium with slow, careful steps, surrounded by an entourage and smiling warmly at the tons of students who had come to attend his address.
And what a session it was! The conversation ranged from books to poetry to getting kissed by Priyanka Chopra Jonas on the cheek for the film adaptation of his short story-turned-novella Susanna’s Seven Husbands — Vishal Bhardwaj’s immensely popular 7 Khoon Maaf, in which Bond had a short cameo as the church Father who effectively ‘married’ the titular femme fatale to Jesus Christ. “I was so giddy and nervous to be on camera that I kept messing up my scene! Vishal was convinced I was doing it on purpose so that Priyanka would have to kiss my cheek more than once,” he admitted sheepishly to the crowd, that sense of humour still wickedly razor-sharp, which one realises not so much from his books as from actually listening to him speak. There was a vast, untapped treasure trove of memory, of fun, of a zeal for life itself simply waiting for an outlet within him, still, as I learned that day — and many years later, it is yet a memory that my friends from college and I share a laugh over every now and then.
Last year, of course, marked Mr Bond’s 90th birthday, and in true Bond style, he had another book up his sleeve to commemorate it. “It’s such a nuisance! I have to keep all these publishers happy, and they insist on trying to bring a book out on my birthday every year! Now I have to come up with something else for the end of the year,” he had told me mock-grumpily when I called last May to wish him a happy birthday and ask about the new novel — The Hoopoe on the Lawn, another delightful tumble into Bond’s childhood and the Grandma, Dhuki and Uncle Ken stories we have grown to love.
“God willing, if I’m still around, I’ll have something else for my next birthday, too…” he had said, which has now been manifested in the form of Life’s Magic Moments, the Bond birthday book for this year. I managed to get hold of a copy in the weeks preceding publication, and it was ever the joy to read. Gentle. Quiet. Enormous in its own way. Not grand but glorious, taking up barely any of your time but quite a large chunk of your heart. Seeping into you and reminding you that it has been a long time since you paused to look at a flower, or listen to the rain; telling you that in the constant rat race of life, choosing not to actively look for the little magic moments can be very detrimental indeed.
Speaking of detrimental, adding a slightly more serious tone to this year’s birthday celebrations is the current political situation rampant in the country. Usually Mr Bond celebrates his birthday with fans at the Cambridge Book Store in Mussoorie, but he has decided not to go ahead with the tradition this year in light of the Pahalgam attack and the subsequent conflict, still very much a living reality. He hopes to meet readers in person in June again, and is also looking forward to the public release of Life’s Magic Moments.
“I’m very lucky because I’ve had about three generations of readers, and that keeps growing in actual numbers. And over the years, a lot of my stories have gone into the school, sometimes college curriculum, and those have become well-known. I’m very grateful for it,” he had told me when we spoke last May — unduly modest, especially when one knows that he has not only shaped childhoods but also much of the literary sensibilities of an entire section of the country. His stories — simple, tender, deeply human as they are — have introduced so many to the quiet magic of Indian hills, the ache of solitude, and the enduring warmth of human connection; unfailing and constant, persistent in a way only love and memory can be.
Life’s Magic Moments is an addition to that legacy, “quiet thoughts from a quiet fellow”, a gentle invitation to pause, to notice, and to cherish the fleeting beauty of everyday life. Life that is now being rushed through but is meant to be savoured, slowly and with care, in the glint of morning light on dewy leaves, in the hush of an afternoon spent by the window, in the company of a good book or a faithful old friend. Bond doesn’t seek to define the path we take, or point out a destination we must get to. He doesn’t map out the journey, or promise revelations; instead, he simply keeps walking, steady and unhurried, as the world unfolds around him, curious and content to see where the path leads. “I ramble,” as he says, warmth lingering in his words, “Into the unknown, where there is no beginning and no end.”
And perhaps that’s where life’s real magic moments are — not in endings or beginnings, but in the quiet grace of simply being. And for those of us who’ve grown up with his stories, it’s a reminder that the most precious gifts often arrive quietly, in between everything else.
