The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns: Ruskin Bond's journey through time

Ruskin Bond's reflective essays revisit vanished small-town India, blending nostalgia, memory, humour, and the quiet ghosts of changing landscapes

The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns: A Journey Through Time

By Ruskin Bond

Published by Aleph Book Company

124 pages  ₹399

 

Ruskin Bond turned 92 on May 19. In capturing the life on mountains and telling stories that both familiarise the unknown and defamiliarise the known, he remains a singular voice in Indian literature in English. Among many of his recently released works, he demonstrates just this quality in The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns: A Journey Through Time. 

In the introduction to this collection of nine essays, Bond notes that in his “ninety years on this cherished land”, he has seen the seemingly welcoming and, at times, disconcerting transformation of villages into small towns, and small towns into big ones, and these big towns becoming cities or megacities, but “in the hills, on some rugged ranges, you will find ghost villages”. 

Bond is referring to the exodus of people from such villages for better learning and employment opportunities, so if anyone is looking for a literal ghost story, they would end up finding only one in this little gem of a book. What readers would most definitely find is how one’s memory of a place in itself appears to be a ghostly encounter. 

The first essay of this collection, “In Old Bangalore”, begins with a lament of sorts for Bangalore becoming Bengaluru. In the 1960s, Bond writes, he would go on walks around Bangalore. He would go to the Koshy’s café, which still exists, and a bookstore — Select Bookshop, whose owner and his son corresponded with Bond for more than 50 years, sending the author “handwritten lists of books they thought would interest” him. This particular essay ends with a twist, which readers must explore for themselves.

 

Compare Bond’s recollections with today’s reality. Haven’t our cities become unwalkable, and urban ecosystems so drained out they don’t appear to be anything like the ones described in these essays? 

In “Meerut After Rain,” the author writes of how the “heady, invigorating odour” of the crushed neem pods on the titular cantonment city’s Mall Road is still etched in his memory, making him wish that those “neem trees are still there”. For many who associate Meerut only with the 1857 Mutiny and Begum Samru, this short essay will appear uniquely revelatory. 

If one talks about India, then cricket, religion, and railways can rarely be missed. Bond touches upon all these in his essays here. In “As the Trains Go By”, the author remembers watching trains arriving and departing in his younger days, noting how the variety of people on platforms jostled for space, only to come “back to [his] room and typewriter and write stories like ‘The Eyes have It’, ‘The Night Train at Deoli’, and ‘Time Stops at Shamli’.” Remembering how he spent time reading books in railways, he enquires if anyone remembers the famous Hindi novelist, Gulshan Nanda, whose books in the 1960s were “everywhere. Even waiters, room-boys, and taxi drivers were reading them.” 

In “Small Town Cinemas”, the passage of time is reflective, inviting readers to see for themselves the clichéd difference between then and now. Bond notes the transformation of cricket here, principally the reduced-time format 20-20 cricket. Then, he recalls how in his “early Dehra Days”, when he had gone to watch Blossoms in the Dust in “The Hollywood” — a cinema hall situated on the Chakrata Road — the movie ran for about only 10 minutes and came to a sudden stop. The audience was informed that Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated and that the “cinema will be closed for a week”. 

His puckish sense of humour is visible in “Leopards in the Lounge”. In this essay, with an anecdote involving one Mr Handa, who was furious seeing his “flower bed” destroyed by a straying leopard, Bond offers a unique take on leopards intruding the small or big towns. 

The mention of a real-life encounter with a ghost appears in “Queen of the Hills”. In his trademark style, Bond muses on a parallel, deeper meaning of ghosts and time, reflecting how, with many of his friends passing, they visit Bond only in his dreams where “they are never old”. Reading Bond’s essays offer the opportunity to appreciate anew the gifts of his timeless, peerless writing, which makes him a relevant literary figure even after all these years. 

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The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and culture critic and can be reached at @writerly_life