Lone Fox Dancing-Ruskin Bond

***^1/2/*****                                                                                                                                     Autobiography

Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography

Ruskin Bond

Today Ruskin Bond amply qualifies for the epithet of ‘Grand old man of English writing by an Indian’. He has been writing for more than six decades now. I remember reading his books as a child about four decades back. In those days his books were not found in every bookshop. One was just aware of an author named Ruskin Bond who had deep connections with Dehradun, wrote in English, some of whose books could be found in a library. Arrival of foreign publishers like Penguin in India gave a terrific fillip to Ruskin Bond’s popularity in 1990s. Innumerable permutation and combination of his old stories, novellas and essays flooded the bookshelves of shops selling English books. He deserves all this renewed attention of publishers and booklovers.

Ruskin Bond’s prose has always been transparent. It gives one a feeling that it truthfully reflects author’s experience. Having read a fair number of his books you seem to know his life story quite completely. Now in his eighties, Ruskin Bond has written his Autobiography. As I read it a thought kept recurring in my mind that I have known these facts about Ruskin Bond all along.

Ruskin Bond wrote about the common life of lay people and the luxurious beauty of nature that was available for all to behold. It was his simple and sparklingly clear prose and honest narration that imbued the humdrum sorrows and joys of common people with enchanting beauty. A similar, placidly soothing narration characterises his autobiography. He evokes a luring picture of pre-independence India as he writes about his childhood years in the princely state of Jamnagar, in the laidback Dehra tucked in the green Himalayan foothills, in Lutyens’s Delhi of mid 1940s and his school years in Shimla. His emotions are controlled, whether he writes about fears of a boy of eight as he sees his parents drifting apart, his extreme loneliness in England where he spent close to four years in his late teens trying desperately to learn to be a writer, his sorrows borne of failed, though sincere love, long years he spent in penury as he struggled to gain foothold in the world of English writing in India of mid-twentieth century, his occasional and modest successes and the eventual stability in life that he gained only in the sixth decade of life. Book is studded with short but captivating sketches of innumerable characters that come alive in his lucid prose; his rustic and affectionate Ayah in Jamnagar, his quirky teachers at Shimla, some kind and some indifferent to boys, his friends at Shimla and Dehra with whom he shared a warm, fulfilling relations, his fun-loving stepfather recklessly pursuing pleasure in Shikar, parties and movies, his old Anglo-Indian landlady, leading a lonely but not dreary life in Mussoorie. It’s an unending list. In the background of all these stories is nature; the hills of Shimla and Mussoorie, Jungles of Dehra, Mustard fields on the outskirts of Delhi, changing weathers and chirping birds. An urbane humour pervades the book. His love for his father whom he lost in his early teens is portrayed with a warm poignancy and subdued sorrow.

Book celebrates the run of the mill life that is the lot of most people. Ruskin Bond’s simple and fluent prose, disarming candour, capability to discern and appreciate warmth in myriad forms of human relations and his unbridled love of nature lends a charm to the book that raises it above commonplace.

Jun 2017