Here are details of a life that have made our childhood more magical and have guided our adult lives to stop and smell the flowers on the way
Ruskin Bond: The Mussoorie Years is author Ganesh Saili’s pictorial offering and a tribute to his friend for over fifty years, the gentle muse of the mountains, Ruskin Bond. In close to 160 pages, the author has captured memorable moments in the life of Ruskin Bond, both in pictures and words, from his infancy to the pleasant portly man he has become. Author Ruskin Bond, now in his eighty-first year, looks back with nostalgia over half a century of dedication to the gentle art of writing from his home in the hills. The author’s romance with the Queen of Hills began in 1963. Putting pen to paper, the literary giant has contributed to making four generations of children into book readers and book lovers.
The book begins with an informal talk between Saili and Bond starting with Ruskin’s first visit to the Mussoorie.
“The Mussoorie connection, if one may call it that, goes back to April 1963. Invited to lunch by the Principal of one of our schools, he met Miss Bean, a lonesome old lady who lived nearby.
“I’d like to give up my present assignment,’ he said, adding: ‘would like to write full-time.”
“Why don’t you rent the upstairs of Maplewood Cottage?’ said Miss Bean. ‘I just use the one room on the ground floor.”
Next day, Ruskin had paid Marjorie Gordon, the landlady; a year’s rent of Rs 400. “It was that simple!” he shrugs, remembering: “I liked unhurried pace and I was not too far from the familiar Dehra of my youth.”
“I wound up things in Delhi and moved into the little cottage a month later,” he tells me.
Though at the end of the year, Mrs Hathi Singh talked him into leaving the place and move to Oaklands, a little further up the hill. From Rajouri Garden came Kamal and Anil, whom he’d taken under his wing. Today, Dr Anil Chopra’s eyes mist up as memories of another day bubble to the surface: “I’d just come thirtysixth in a class of thirty-six!” he tells me. “I was all of seven years old when my father deserted my mother to settle in England.” Ruskin had just come back from England (after the publication of his first novel The Room on the Roof) and was living in Rajouri Garden with his mother.
“I’m headed to the hills, to Mussoorie,” he told Anil’s mother. “Let the boy come with me and I’ll put him into a good school up there.”
“Thirty-sixth in a class of thirty-six!” my mother moaned, wondering which school would admit the boy.
“Soon after, nonetheless, I found myself grasping his finger as I walked through the gates of a school”‘ he reminisces on a return journey forty years later, adding, almost as an after-thought: “Ah! He’d read David Copperfield to me in the evenings. It planted in me a love for reading. In the first test, I came third in class. Ever since that day, I’ve always stayed among the top three!”
Ruskin was to see Anil through school, medical college and then on to America where he practices medicine.”
Presented in this hard-cover, interspersed with photographs and writing are inspirational quotes by Bond himself, this unique offering gives the reader a glimpse into the life and times of Mussoorie’s own resident Wordsworth in prose, Ruskin Bond.
All in all, an interesting, pictorial book to add to your book-shelf.