An old television serial in the UK used to begin, ‘There are a million stories in the naked city and this is just one of them....’ For Ruskin Bond, however, naked cities hold very few stories. Three years in London and five in Delhi left him dry—unless you count The Room on the Roof. Whatever he wrote evolved from Mussoorie and Landour—the small towns where everyone knows everyone and where stories of the everyday—simple ones of love and aspiration—are rarely at a pressure cooker pace.
Bond’s stories trickle through the pages like drops of water down a window pane. A Long Walk for Bina, for example, talks about the animals and plants on the hillside and the easy co-existence of school children with leopard cubs. Bond acknowledges that leopards are dangerous, but points out that if they are not meddled with they leave people alone. The nature he knows is an integral part of life, almost a character—it gives children beetles for races and a wealth of guavas to be plucked from the neglected orchards belonging to the rich who couldn’t be bothered.
At the heart of Small Towns Big Stories lies the beauty of the surroundings, the mountains and the tree-lined roads and dips into icy cold pools with boys who have no bathrooms with running hot and cold water. This matches the natural wisdom and innocence which characterises Bond’s style—it is a world in which for the most part evil does not exist, despite scams, cash crunches and even murder—his murderers tend to confess in weak moments. Some might say it’s almost too ideal, but the rustic setting gives Bond the opportunity to talk of the mysterious mountains that shoulder the stars.
Bond has a cast of characters with whom he is perfectly familiar. His human comedies are acted out by Dukhi the gardener, whose name recurs, attached to various occupations throughout the stories; Amit, who sells goods on the streets; Ranji, the feisty Koki and sundry maharanis.
The leitmotif is that of the lonely boy scraping a living with his pen in a room at the top of the stairs, but reluctant to move to the big city, or the lonely young man mesmerised by the beauty of a pair of dark eyes glimpsed at a station but unable to move beyond that single moment of poetry at night. This is possibly because the stories Bond wrote when he was younger are more nostalgic and reflect his own loneliness. Autobiography creeps in and on occasion the character in the story is Bond himself without the disguises—young boy, young man, ageing writer. In fact, the order of the stories very often leaves the reader guessing as to who the narrator is—Bond or not Bond. One can assume that the story of the child at his father’s funeral comes from Bond’s own life, though the child remains anonymous against the backdrop of hill station bungalows and resigned servants.
Towards the end are a cluster of nonfiction pieces about life in the hills, with their murders and romances—though like all old yarns they sound like tall tales told over a fire. Agatha Christie was in fact inspired by the report of a long distance murder in Simla and Kipling asked Conan Doyle to help him solve the case. Bond does deftly suggest a solution, because he gives the reader the story of the Roys, silver screen stars now no longer matinee idols. The lady falls ill and survives but her husband dies cities away and the rest is the silence of a once legendary hotel with long verandahs run by Nandu.
Bond unabashedly admires Kipling for his vivid descriptions of a vanished Hindostan, though Kipling has been derided for generations for rabid colonialism. But then, issues of who is colonial and who isn’t do not form part of Bond’s writing—as far as he is concerned there is an Anglo-Indian world that embraces the hills, their beauty and all their legends. After all, the hill stations were set up by homesick Brits looking for a climate they could relate to and their legacy is in Bond’s blood.
This is a pleasant book, an old-fashioned kind of thing to curl up with on a soft bed with the stars peeping through the windows and a lover or a dog snoring gently behind one. Bond throws in all kinds of advice, all comfortably delivered. And over the years he has acquired the gift of selecting and reshuffling so that his books have become a well loved combination of old and new. That said, two episodes are exactly the same, barring changed names, and could well have been avoided with a little editorial care.
