Happy 90th, Ruskin Bond! :)
India's most loved living writer Ruskin Bond turns 90 today. We bring to you a wish, a trivia and a letter featuring the only living Bond we readers know, Ruskin aka our beloved Rusty.
Dearest Reader,
This Sunday marks the birthday of arguably India’s most loved writer, Ruskin Bond. He turned 90 today. Hardly there would be any reader of Indian writing who has not encountered Ruskin Bond’s words.
Set in the hills and in the heart of nature, many of his books take us on a walk through his hometown in the foothills of the Himalayas, making us listen to the birds, watch the pine trees dance and hear the hum of the mighty mountains of the Shivalik. Be it his stories of childhood or ghosts, of Susanna’s Seven Husbands or Rusty’s Room on the Roof or his most widely read short story Woman on Platform Number 8 in our NCERT English textbook: it won’t be farfetched to say his words have crossed paths with us at least once in our lifespan, often leaving us mesmerised with their honesty and simplicity. For the true Ruskin fan, there’s his autobiography Scenes from a Writer’s Life describing his adolescence, documenting him getting bothered by acne or discovering self-pleasure, capturing his formative years. For the connoisseur, who wants to grow beyond Ruskin’s kutti stories written for children, there’s this little-known erotica titled The Sensualist.
Trivia
Not many people know that in the 1970s, Ruskin faced obscenity charges for The Sensualist, which appeared in a serialised form in the adult magazine Debonair that the late Outlook-editor Vinod Mehta then edited.
“Debonair was always getting into trouble, so partly it was Debonair. Had it been published elsewhere, perhaps I would have gotten away with it,” Ruskin jokes in one of his interviews. One day, during the two years that the case dragged on in court, Ruskin was waiting, stressed, at a police station when he was distracted from the unpleasantness of the situation by the sight of swallows nesting in the eaves. “You are lucky if you have that ability to see beyond the moment of crisis into something that is very everyday, ordinary. Then you feel life is normal and going on anyway; this, too, will pass. And usually there is something that keeps you going,” he says. “And sure enough, at the end of two years—during which time the public prosecutor too died—the judge said he enjoyed the story and gave me an honourable acquittal.”
It’s uncanny to see how this troublesome story of his resolves itself in the true Ruskin fashion, with him finding solace in nature, while the subtle irony of how the judge relished his erotica underlines the end.
A Story
The most beautiful find with respect to Ruskin that we discovered is a letter he replied to our friend and a writer & a illustrator Nina Sud, who wrote an article titled ‘I Want To Be Ruskin Bond’ for EpicIndia.com. Ruskin replied with a handwritten letter after reading it! Nina had put it up on her blog.
How cute, isn’t it? We just love his handwriting and that tiny image of the mountains and trees on the letterhead. How so very sweet of him to reply! When you read the word Affectionately, you can feel the affection.
We also have a tiny story of our own. When one of our curators Harsh was in college, after a lot of hustle, he found out Ruskin Bond’s phone number. He remembers calling on his landline (Ruskin doesn’t carry a mobile) to invite him for the college literary festival.
Thrilled and nervous, Harsh began, “Hello! Am I speaking with Mr. Bond?”
“Yes, speaking,” came a voice in deep baritone.
Mr. Bond confirmed of making it to the festival, which was two months away, and Harsh started telling all his friends and relatives how he would go pick Mr. Bond from his house in Landour, Mussorrie. Alas, as the dates neared, Mr. Bond fell sick and had to cancel his plan. Harsh had to make-do with showing off Ruskin Bond’s contact on his phone to his friends for some months to get over the embarrassment. To this date, he grieves missing this sliver of a chance to spend six hours one-on-one with the legend.
The plan for Landour is not too far. Both our curators still wish to meet him either this year or the next. We believe no Indian writer has motivated more kids to read than Mr. Bond. Be it through Adventures of Rusty or The Blue Umbrella, Ruskin showed how simple words could contain the most profound emotions. His writing exemplified what a well-written story could do—from making us cry to making us laugh, from making us love nature to making us fear ghosts, and across all through his stories, it did the difficult job of making us think. Reading his stories feels like talking to our rooted and wise friend, and perhaps that’s why, despite his age, he seems not like a distant author but more like our teddy bear pal. To kids, and to those of us who were kids when we first encountered him, he’s always going to be our friend Rusty or Ruskin than the deep baritoned Mr. Bond.
Speaking of kids, we have a fun announcement for you. A new subcommunity has mushroomed this weekend at Cubbon Reads. It’s called Cubbon Tales. Every Saturday, alongside Cubbon Reads, from 11 am-11.45 am, Cubbon Tales is going to host a storytelling session for kids by a storyteller mom. :) If you have kids, nephews & nieces or grandkids, come with them to Cubbon on Saturdays. Read along with us and break out for an hour for a fun children story enacted with props. While the story is for children, adults (especially those who never read a children’s story growing up) are most welcome to relive their younger years again!
Ruskin himself said this and we quote: “When we are young, we can put up with a great deal of discomfort in order to follow a dream. If, after thirty-five years, I'm still doing my own thing, it's because I haven’t forgotten the dream.”
A Wish
While all the public wishes for Ruskin Bond will be unanimous: wishing our beloved Rusty a long and healthy life, personally, we do have a secret wish from the author, Mr. Bond. We would love to read a serious fiction—an adult literary novel—by him that sheds light on his life spent as a bachelor in a nondescript mountain town.
We believe there are very few books that document those few who choose to not marry and take the offbeat path of living by oneself, with an adopted family but without a partner. Would one such person miss love in life? What brings peace and solitude to such singlehood? Does one turn into a saint or does one feel lonely and depressed at times? Or was there a secret partner that none of us know about? Although our beloved writers love turning their imagination into works of fiction, we direly wish someone like Ruskin to tell us, through semi-autobiographical fiction or an autobiography, what it might be like to grow old by oneself in the lap of the nature?
A Ruskin Poem
To close and to truly do justice to Ruskin and his wide body of written work, it’s important we mention how fine a poet he is. We all have read his stories but very few of his poems have reached us. Here’s one we really love, which makes perfect sense for our community of book lovers:
Wishing for more books from Mr. Bond,
and a merrier and a heartier Rusty,
Cubbon Reads
P.S. If you have Ruskin Bond stories of your own, do write back to us in details. We’ll share the excerpts that we find interesting in our next letter, tagging you!
P.P.S. If you wish to learn more about Ruskin and his monk-like writing room, we recommend reading this elaborate immersion into his monastic life by the writer Mayank Austen Soofi.