The Secret Life Of Ruskin Bond

The first, `A Handful of Nuts, is a new autobiographical work irreverent, funny and, well, great reading. It makes for a good quick read, evoking a smile here, a chuckle there, bringing to life the milieu of a small town Dehra Dun in the 50s. A number of idiosyncratic characters surface, flitting in and out of the authors life. There is the Maharani of Magador, the scaly demoness (Bond uses savage animal imagery for her) ready to pounce on any new toy she develops a fancy for. Theres her brown-eyed young daughter, Indu, whom the young author has a crush on. This is no classroom stuff precisely because the protagonist ends up not saying beautiful nothings to the pretty young thing. Instead he finds himself in the arms of the domineering, sex-starved mother. How the hero finally escapes the clutches of the virago is a question that remains unanswered. All we have is an epilogue which says the Maharani grew pottier in her later years, hit the bottle and remained content in the belief that she was Mae West. The daughter, the author informs us in a tone of evident relief, didnt go the mothers way.

 

There is the dhobis boy, Sitaram, who starts as a nuisance for the 21-year-old author, and develops into a friend, always around to lend a helping hand. Bond cant resist the temptation to tell us that this lad was to become a popular star under an assumed name! Bond gives you some clues to his identity: he dances, he cant act but he has a sexy smile, the hair on his head is still as black as black can be, but that on his torso is fast greying. Bond, of course, has the last laugh. Most of them (actors) are a bit like that, arent they? he chuckles.

Sundry other characters, each identifiable by some quirky trait, make an appearance. The pride of Doon school, Jai Shankar, forever broke and ever borrowing to buy jalebis; Suresh Mathur, forever drunk and in that state waxing eloquent on the fourth dimension; and William Matheson, who turns potty without that Charminar to pull at... Stewart Granger visits the small town, and so does Dilip Kumar. Nergis Dalal makes an appearance as a young SPCA activist as also does Tom Alter, the aspiring actor son of American missionaries. Bond couldnt resist the little dig at Khushwant Singh, then editor of Yojana, to whom he offered a small piece on how to prepare a good punch, but which was politely turned down. Mr Singh liked his Scotch, but punch was not within the purview of the Five-Year Plan, he avers.

The second novella, `The Sensualist: A Cautionary Tale was first published some twenty-odd years ago and appeared in Debonair. What Bond had not anticipated in making a departure from his usual, bordering-on-the-idyllic style was a non-bailable arrest warrant on charges of obscenity. The case was tried in Bombay; the prosecutor died during the trial and the judge finally exonerated Bond of all charges in a 60-page verdict!

Determined not to stretch his luck, the novella did not appear in print again till Penguin brought out the Bond omnibus last year. It is evident that the parameters of obscenity have undergone a cataclysmic change today the work would not even elicit a twitch of the eyebrow.

The author himself admits that it is a fair departure from his usual style. The narrative evokes a sombre mood; the story evolves as a narrative within a narrative. The narrator runs into a recluse who claims the maid, Mulia, who looked after him through his growing years, made not a god but a satyr of him. He develops the strange and uncanny power to dominate peoples minds and will them to do what he desires. And with it is an insatiable sexual appetite. The only spirit he is powerless against, though, is the spirit of innocence. But by his thirtieth year he is a spent force, forced into self-exile to live life reliving those sensuous moments he spent with his many women. The recluse in the mountains is my other self, my `secret sharer, says Bond. But it is a self that is apparently repressed most of the time.