Fiction Reads: The Room on the Roof by Ruskin Bond

Reimagining or recalling teenage life has led to the realization of many literary gems. Roald Dahl's Boy and Going Solo are sparkling examples of reflecting on a thrilling childhood and youth, in selective retelling, decades later. 

The Room on the Roof  (1956) is unique, as Bond points out in the introduction - It's a novel about adolescence, written by an adolescent. The debut novel does offer a rare, immediate perspective on how intense, life-altering and turbulent adolescence can be. 

Sourced from a journal Bond maintained when he was 17, the writings were fictionalized and found a sympathetic publisher in Andre Deutsch.

The book won the 1957 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, given for outstanding literary achievement to a commonwealth* writer under thirty.

I purchased the book during my trip to Mussoorie, with vague memories of having read it in my twenties.    

Front cover detail from one of the editions

Friendships, love, and rawness: The Room on the Roof is largely raw, but undeniably beautiful and honest, germinating with early callings of the writer Bond would transform into - Use of simple English prose, resplendent with parallels drawn to nature's beauty and a freewheeling life chronicle. 

The genius British comic writer P.G. Wodehouse's early works, especially novels like The Gold Bat (1904) weren't half as funny as his later works, but hinted at a comic genius in the making. Often, a not-so-compelling debut has in its roots, the makings of a better author, if they keep at it.       

The edition I bought at Mussoorie

Stereotyping and immaturity?: Surprisingly, this tale of 16-year-old Anglo-Indian Rusty growing up in Dehradun is told in the third person narrative, instead of what could have been, a more intimate first-person literary telling. It's almost as if Bond wanted to distance himself and consider the text objectively.  

The descriptions of Rusty's new friends, of changing seasons, festivals, the room on the roof, picnics, drunkards, running away from home, his first love, and first kiss, make for compelling reading.

Bond has admitted how he is afraid of anything sophisticated and smart in life, a reoccuring thought in The Room on the Roof. 

That a certain reviewer John Wain, labeled the novel's prose to be babu English is to an extent justified. 

The descriptions of dirt, cows on the street, poverty, chaos, population, and the market are Indian stereotypes that have persisted in foreign media's stunted descriptions of India. In these parts The Room on the Roof feels it may need a rewrite by a wiser, more perspective-rich Bond.

From the heart: The strong trunk and branches of Ruskin Bond's writing has been to narrate with a straight-as-an-arrow approach with a matter-of-fact descriptive style. 

The Room on the Roof may not be an instant classic, but is certainly a gem of a book for the easy charm, wisdom, nature truths, conviction, and belief Ruskin Bond infuses into his writings, reasons why he is still widely read. 

*Commonwealth - An organization whose members are the United Kingdom and some other countries that were once a part of the British Empire. (Oxford languages dictionaries)    

(Article by Snehith Kumbla)

A young Ruskin Bond with his cat Suzie

Fiction Reads: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. 

- From The Old Man and the Sea | Page 1

Violence in its varied forms was an endless fascination for American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961). Recurrent themes in his work - War, deep-sea fishing, hunting, bullfighting, great loss, tragedy, and grace under pressure.

The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is a deep dive into man’s bond with nature, the contradictions, ironies, and struggles of a fisherman’s life, culminating in how a man can be destroyed but not defeated. 

Illustration by Michael Nicholson

The Old Man and the Sea synopsis: Man, fish, nature

Santiago, an old deep-sea fisherman lives near the Gulf Stream, on Havana coast, Cuba. He has gone 84 days without taking a fish. 

(How could a man go that many days without taking a fish? Deep sea fishing: this was a time of fishing lines, and most sole fishermen didn’t have access to modern technology that makes fishing today a more lopsided, less adventurous experience.)  

The old man's fishing companion Manolin, a boy who has great affection for the old man, is asked to go on another boat by his family after 40 luckless days. 

The initial pages glide with the boy seeing off the old man on his next fishing trip. 

Rowing his small boat (skiff), the old man gets a huge Marlin trapped in one of his fishing lines. But, as the giant fish begins pulling the boat, an epic man vs. fish battle ensues. 

What fate awaits the old man and the fish? 

Flying fish, illustration by Raymond Sheppard

Epic, detailed, yet concise telling  

Hemingway’s greatest achievement in The Old Man and the Sea is seamless, razor-sharp editing. 

Not a word seems wasted. 

Fitted into 100-odd novella pages - A word more and the tale would have felt stale, redundant, and stretched. That's how precise the telling is. 

Nitpicking - The straightforward narration leaves little room for multiple characters, but then Hemingway is looking for the 'ocean in a drop' experience. 

Sea, fish, old man, fishing line, and boat, are the prime characters. 

The old man’s musings surge with great insights. 

Fish, he utters in one instance, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before the day ends. 

The old man can't help admiring the fish, but he is bound by his fate and occupation to kill it. 

The fish has the attributes of the old man’s courage and fighting spirit. At many moments, it is like the old man is arm wrestling an equal. 

In the third-person narration and the old man's monologues, the extraordinary resilience of the old man and the Marlin is artfully depicted. 

The old man speaking to his tiring arms, to the Marlin, and how he avoids looking at his late wife’s photograph at home: strains of him battling loneliness with grace and courage. 

The complete story was published in Life magazine before the book's publication.
The magazine edition reportedly sold five million copies.  

The Old Man and the Sea book review 

Hemingway often dived into life-threatening situations. His experiences were the source of his riveting, unsentimental, subtle and intense fiction.

For a long time, no writer came close to conveying with unblinking, crisp prose, the weight of standing up to hardships. 

Hemingway was a rare one. 

The last of the great Hemingway fiction works: in The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway goes where few writers have, in gritty detail on life’s endless mysteries and stark truths.  

Islands in a Stream (1970), published nine years after his death, features a similar fish-boy battle but pales in comparison.  

That The Old Man and the Sea won Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) and a Pulitzer (1953) is merely a footnote to the life Hemingway led and how he wrote.

Of late, Hemingway's works have been unfairly dismissed as hyper-masculine. The writer's passion for big game hunting and the brutality of bullfighting may seem odd to many readers now. But his storytelling remains untarnished by time.  

As read in a book preface - There were many imitators of Ernest Hemingway's writing style, but the standard he set was too severe.  

(Article by Snehith Kumbla)

Poetry Reads: The Gitanjali Album by Gitanjali Ghei

Gitanjali Ghei (1961-1977)

The Gitanjali Album has been an aching, heartbreaking read. How does a child confront the stark truth that she is dying of cancer? I can’t begin to imagine. 

Discovering Gitanjali

I first heard of Gitanjali Ghei at the fag end of the last century from my ninth-grade teacher. 

A curly-haired bespectacled woman in her late thirties, she often mentioned interesting connected things in passing, instead of going through the syllabus like a tunnel boring machine.

She mentioned a girl whose writings were discovered by her family in the most unlikely places in the house after she had passed on. Then the teacher commenced reading from the textbook and that was that. But that little detail of an adolescent girl’s death and her discovered poetry remained submerged in my memory.

An illustration by Gitanjali

The search for the elusive collection 

Thus began the search to procure a published copy of Gitanjali Ghei's writings. 

The last known edition of Gitanjali's poems had been published by Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, Anand, India. The second edition (1995) followed in the wake of the first (1992). The book has been out of print ever since.

I have been to second-hand book sales and book vendors over the years, having discovered some priceless works, but not Gitanjali’s poetry. Internet’s arrival eventually allowed me to discover if not all but the prominent poems of Gitanjali Ghei.

Finally at the start of 2022, with the world still reeling from the pandemic’s new, milder wave, I chanced upon the 1995 second edition (in good as new condition) on a website that sells rare books.

The copy was dispatched to me via book post from Germany. 

After two suspense-ridden weeks, I finally held the elusive copy in my hands, and a two-decade book search ended.

I began reading with unblinking intensity, my heart, pounding a little.     

Gone too soon...

The Gitanjali Album: A Teenager’s Testament, a collection of poems and notes by Gitanjali, also contains photographs of her and her family, a couple of her sketches, and an interview with her mother.

Gitanjali Ghei’s painful, demolishing fight with cancer began in early 1976. Her poems reflect her struggles to accept impending death, conversations with God, the deep sadness of her family.

The first poem of the collection is a short, nippy one, where Gitanjali hopes to live up to her name. 

As her mother Khushi Badruddin recounts in the interview – She was about 10 or 11 years of age when she realized the full meaning of her name and of the book she was named after. She almost had a showdown with me. “Why did you give me this name?” Do you know it was a Nobel Prize winner?”

To truly sense that there could be no tomorrow, here is Gitanjali ebbing three paragraphs on the dire uncertainties of life. 

The long wait for death is harrowing for Gitanjali. To see her parents and brother watch her fade away daily is even more painful. Here are three extracts from her poems.

Gitanjali vs. death 

Gitanjali wording her anguish as an act of courage and extraordinary grace in the face of pain and death...and that is why the simple verse grazes the heart like a sharp knife. 

Barely an adolescent, Gitanjali tries to seek answers in her bewilderment making this collection a torrid but stoic-faced read. Would we find similar courage if certain but prolonged death looms over us? 

What would we do in the face of death? Is how we live then a precursor to how we will confront death? 

(Article by Snehith Kumbla)   

Non-Fiction Reads: Lone Fox Dancing by Ruskin Bond

^^

As I walked home last night

I saw a lone fox dancing

In the cold moonlight.

I stood and watched. Then

Took the low road, knowing

The night was his by right.

Sometimes, when words ring true,

I'm like a lone fox dancing

In the morning dew.

- From Lone Fox Dancing by Ruskin Bond

I am typing these words minutes after finishing Ruskin Bond's charming autobiography Lone Fox Dancing (Speaking Tiger, 2017). 

Much of Bond's life stories are scattered in heavy showers of prose across his fictional work, written largely for children. Bond is clearly aware of the repetition and doesn't make Lone Fox Dancing a heavy, chronological account. 

Bond's works have never been about ambition and scale, but about telling it straight from the heart. Lone Fox Dancing radiates sunlit warmth in many such moments.  

A few months old at Kasauli, 1934

Eventful childhood

Born in Kasauli, joyful early years, experiencing loss, living with a stepfather, boarding school, making and losing friends, elusive leopards, adolescence coinciding with India's violent partition and independence, writing ambitions, unhappy years in England, love, frustration, nature, peace...elements that make for an eventful page-turner. 

The first two decades of Bond's life are retold with vivid imagery, of a difficult childhood, struggling youth, and how life was never a bed of roses.

Selective and engrossing

This is not a - tell it all. Several incidents have been omitted to avoid embarrassing and hurting people - Bond confides in the prologue.  

The writer chooses few, but turbulent, lively moments to embroider this telling. 

Two tales stand out. 

The most engrossing is Bond's love for a 16-year-old girl, a friend's sister, and how the one-sided quest leaves him devastated and heartbroken. How Bond got over the disappointment is an unexpected, hilarious titbit. 

The other riveting portion is of Bond's house roof going airborne, leading to snow and rain seeping in, threatening to plunge Bond and his family into utter chaos.     

Bond with his adopted family 

Photographs down memory lane 

The 50-odd centerspread photographs are a treasure house, most of them black & white clicks sparkling with rich detail - made me think of how the modern ease in clicking photographs has robbed us of valuing defining moments.   

Bond's early years in Jamnagar, and clicks of his parents and grumpy grandmother, at his father's RAF room in Delhi, with school friends, make for evocative viewing. 

My favourite is of a 16-year-old Bond with the Bishop Cotton's football team, 1950, featuring two Sikh brothers, and one German, Irani, Nepalese, Tibetian, Austrian and English player each. It's like a slice of the globe represented in that frame. 

Other gems feature Bond's childhood trekking friends, swimming in the Ganga, dressed in kurta-pajama, his beloved pet cat Suzie listening to the radio, and picnic clicks, bookended with some heartwarming images with his adopted family. 

The one with Bond's window view speaks of a serene writing atmosphere like few photographs do.   

Happy times at his father's RAF home, Delhi

Classic Ruskin Bond 

Bond is not aiming to impress, astonish, or showcase an extraordinary life. He admits to attaining financial freedom eventually at age 68, the perks and troubles of gaining fame, and why having a family that cares is bliss and peace for him in old age. 

Lone Fox Dancing is not among the greatest autobiographies ever written. It is a sedate, beautiful, gentle reminder to all those who walk their road or paddle their own canoe, as Bond puts it.

The immense joys of living as one wishes to, against all odds, is what dwells like a wild breeze between the words in Lone Fox Dancing. 

(Article by Snehith Kumbla)

Poetry Reads: Bhang Diary by Snehith Kumbla

Bhang Diary 

by Snehith Kumbla

when I laugh,

the whole body,

one big mouth

of laughter

when I sing,

words emit

like a

seismograph

If I squat, drowsy,

all my teeth are

melting down

a whirlpool

walk, look back

and wonder,

whose vanishing

footsteps

are they,

meanwhile,

my as-lost-as-me

friends, frantic for

shade in the sun,

and can't find it

together, like a

splash of colours,

we lie in the garden

for the madness to pass

later, at home they ask

about the blood red

eyes, I say, it was

some colour, some holi

^^

(Bhang Diary was first published in the Mar-Apr 2012 issue of Reading Hour magazine.)

Drinking bhang, a delicious beverage made from the leaves of the cannabis plant, is an adventurous, boisterous tradition on Holi, the festival of colours in India. 

I was slurring through the first three lines of a song after my first glass of bhang a decade and a half ago. My well-meaning friends kept persuading me to eat sweets after that first glass, assuring me that it helps lessen the effect. I remember thinking these are really good friends, who were ensuring that I don't get drowsy. But I was the evening entertainment an hour later, slurring through Kabhi Kabhi Aditi Zindagi Mein Yuh Hi under a tree at the city university grounds, and the friends laughing away like hyenas on the National Geographic Africa special. 

Thandai is an unsuspecting, delicious milk-based beverage that makes up bhang, and since that first slurring through the song year, it became kind of a tradition every holi to provide entertainment and get through the entire day in the attentive, immediate present.

Nothing usually occurs during the initial hours, it is at a moment when you least expect that the bhang kicks in. I have had friends view the universe and the solar system, look at overgrown garden grass for hours and have other slow-moving delusions. 

Here's to that time of the time again! Cheers!   

(Poetry, article, photography and art by Snehith Kumbla)

Travel Reads: Cambridge Book Depot, Mussoorie

Let's cut to the chase. You are a Ruskin Bond fan and want to meet him. What do you do? 

Reach Dehradun, rent a two-wheeler (INR 500-800/a day), take the two-hour drive to Mussoorie, and get to Cambridge Book Depot (CBD). 

When? Bond used to come down to CBD between 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturdays. 

The catch? Bond hasn't been to the store since the pandemic struck in late-March 2020. 

I was in Mussoorie on January 3rd, 2022 and followed the modus operandi detailed above. 

The scooter ride to Mussoorie from Dehradun was wonderful, as I gained height the air got colder, the vertical sights of the famed hill station gradually appeared on the left. 

Boo! Crowded!

I found Mussoorie to be no longer the scenic, quiet, nature-rich refuge as described in Bond's books. My first thought as I parked the scooter - Tourist hell. Instead of the planned overnight stay, decided to make the trip short with a visit to CBD, followed by lunch, and some snooping around.  

Cambridge Book Depot is on Mall Road, one steep section may be a tough walk for some, the book store can be seen at the right, little pocket of a place, featuring Ruskin Bond's profile cutouts, his books featuring prominently on the store display. 

Cosy, cosy, snuggle, snuggle 

The store's owner Sunil Arora was polite and helpful as I picked up a selection of Bond's works. Inside, books are stacked to the right, left, and middle, that there are two narrow passages for the visitors to explore the titles. This is not a sprawling place, more of a cosy, snuggly reader's haven. 

Several interesting titles apart from Indian writers adorn the store. Books featuring Landour's famous birds and trees, and chronicling Mussoorie's history caught my eye. 

Ruskin Bond lives at walking distance from CBD, but it didn't seem right at pandemic time to intrude his privacy and peace. So be it. So it was.  

There are some great eateries near CBD for lunch, and those who don't mind crowds can probably set base at Mussoorie and explore. 

I may yet, revisit CBD another time, and hopefully Bond, presently 87, will still be around for a short conversation, book signing and may yet adopt me (bloated childhood fantasy). 

(Article by Snehith Kumbla)

Short Story Reads: A Bond with the Mountains by Ruskin Bond

It is one thing to dream of living a simple, content life in the mountains. But to live the life one writes about, especially of a lifetime spent in deep communion with nature, well, that is something rare and profound. 

A Bond with the Mountains is a 1998 slim collection of stories, poems and thoughts by Landour's famous resident writer. 

But for the inevitable melancholic tragedy of No Room for a Leopard, the remarkable bonding of the young and old in A Bouquet of Love, nothing overtly dramatic occurs in this collection. 

Instead the pages are fragrant with Bond's deep bond (yes, Bond's bond) with all things green, flowering, chirping, flowing and flourishing. 

After all Ruskin Bond chose the mountains instead of the (more commercially viable option for a struggling freelance writer) plains, a choice that has defined his writing life and the view outside the window. 

Simple things: A New Flower is about a nine-year-old and the writer raving over a newly blossomed yet unknown flower. 

How man's drive for speed, comfort and machinery leaves jungle creatures vulnerable to his endless march is gently revealed in the thrilling Dragon in the Tunnel. 

No Room for a Leopard is the bullet-pierced heart of this collection, for the impending tragedy of the brutality that follows the arrival of man. 

The interpersed poems feel like the sway of branches to the evening breeze. The lines that particularly stand out in Living with Mountains and in a way sums up Ruskin Bond's life journey go: 

Once you have lived with mountains, / Under the benedictory pines / And deodars, near stars / And a brighter moon, / With wood smoke and mist, / Sweet smell of grass, dew lines / On spider-spun, sun-kissed / Buttercup and vine; / Once you have lived with these / Blessed God's favourite then, / You will return, / You will come back / To touch the trees and grass, / And climb once more the windswept mountain pass. 

This is not an utterly epic, absolutely unexpected collection, but of an elderly narrator living the long sunset of his life in quiet glee. What is dear to him splashes and thrives in these pages. 

Stories like The Glacier, My Tall Green Friends, To the River, A Mountain Stream, Tenacity of Mountain Water and Mother Hill are notes from the narrator's journal, counting his blessings and humming his gratitude to mountain life. 

The cynics may grumble that Bond could have thrived in writing more complex and layered tales, that he mostly goes semi-autobiographical, and seldom dwells on human anguish and darkness. Apart from not believing in ghosts but seeing them all the time, as he has often said cheekily. 

The heartfelt descriptions of natural beauty is what makes Bond's writing appealing, he's just being himself. Like Robert Frost, Ruskin Bond chose the less travelled path and behold! That has made all the difference. 

Endnote: A mingling of childhood life, uphill hikes, youth, ice cold stream baths, fireside tales, friendship and radiance, A Bond with the Mountains is about brief, concise pleasures, on the melodious importance of little things, something we city denizens have long forgotten and buried deep in our hearts.       

(Article by Snehith Kumbla)