The Indian Bond

Book review of 'Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography'

Lone Fox Dancing

My Autobiography

Ruskin Bond

Speaking Tiger

277 pages; Rs 599

In 1963, Ruskin Bond paid Rs 400 as annual rent and moved into Maplewood Lodge, Mussoorie, giving up a stable job in Delhi, in a lope to freedom. “I was almost thirty — still young enough to take a few risks. If the dream was to become reality, this was the time to do something about it,” he writes in retrospect. The dream he talks about is of living only by his writing — an almost impossible one then, as it is now. Miraculously, he survived, and even did well, and this is the story leading up to the momentous decision and what happened afterwards. 

Those of us who grew up watching Ek tha Rusty on Doordarshan and reading his books in the 1990s will find many of the tales in this book quite familiar; especially, if one has read his earlier autobiography Scenes from a Writer’s Life  (1997). The first three parts of this nearly 300-page-long book recounts his birth, his early years in Jamnagar where his father served as a teacher to the children in the royal family, the separation of his parents and the idyllic year Mr Bond spent with his father in Delhi where he was an Indian Air Force officer, and his father’s death.

These are not new stories, but as with all Ruskin Bond tales, the pleasure is not always in discovering something new, but in finding something familiar. The narrative is expanded, with more anecdotes than in Scenes from a Writer’s Life. For instance, he recollects how Ram Advani, the famous bookseller of Lucknow, was a clerk at Bishop Cotton School, Shimla, and remembered the day Mr Bond’s father had turned up there to get Mr Bond admitted. There are also more details about his interactions with Diana Athill, the legendary editor and publisher, who had picked Mr Bond’s first novel, A Room on the Roof. 

One missing anecdote, that Mr Bond has recollected elsewhere, was how he took Ms Athill to have paan (betel) much to her chagrin. Another thing that I missed were the letters exchanged between the young writer — Mr Bond was only 22 years old when the book was published and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957 — and the publisher. These had been included in the previous volume. As compensation, there are more pictures, some older and black-and-white; other new, in colour. For Ruskin Bond aficionados, it’s an added pleasure in this well-produced book.

The fourth part takes off where  Scenes from a Writer’s Life  had ended — with Mr Bond giving up his claims on England where he had lived for about three years, trying to find a career, but deciding to return to India. His reason: Though he was of English origin, he missed the sun and the sights and smells of the land that was his birthplace. “I was back in India, and I had no intention of going elsewhere, and as the land was full of all kinds of people of diverse origin, I decided I’d just be myself, all-Indian...” 

This was a brave choice — then as now — and a timely reminder of the diversity of this country, constantly under threat from acerbic ultra-nationalists. In the final pages of the book, he describes how he was disallowed from entering the Jagannath Temple at Puri and later charged a higher entry fee for being a “foreigner” at Konark.

There are quite a few revelations in the final part, such as his work with Tibetan refugees as a CARE employee in Delhi and his life with his family in Rajouri Garden, the colony of Partition refugees in west Delhi. These incidents have hardly found any reference in his more popular works that are set mostly in Dehradun on his youth or the hills around Mussoorie. These provide us a glimpse into the more pragmatic aspects of a writer’s life, such as holding on to a steady job to pay rent or the bills. He also dwells on the production of Junoon, the 1978 Shyam Benegal film adapted from his novel The Flight of Pigeons, and his run in with censorship during the Emergency, when his  story The Sensualist was hauled up by a court for being allegedly obscene. One only hopes that the fourth section was longer with more such anecdotes.