Last week I happened to be in Landour. You know the tiny cantonment town, north of Dehradun in Mussoorie? The town where everyone from Prannoy Roy to Vishal Bhardwaj and Stephen Alter to Victor Banerjee have their ample bungalow retreats, all within the same mile?
Still can’t place the town? Okay, how about the town that has been the home and heart of Mr. Bond? Not the fictitious spy but the real, literary Bond: Ruskin Bond. And there you have it! Yes, the land of Ruskin Bond. Because that is what Landour really is. You may have never read a single book of his, never heard him speak live or queued up to get his autograph and yet you simply cannot miss his omnipresence in Landour. And indeed, in all Mussoorie.
Bond’s presence and voice only get amplified a few times over, if your visit happens to coincide with his birthday. His 91st birthday! The cabbie who picks you up at the airport arrivals and soon gets chatty, proudly mentions him. The homestay folks who induct you into Landour, speaking of the town’s background and history, save a large part of their introduction for Bond. The tea shop around the corner has a shelf dedicated to his books. The local store selling homemade jams, pickles and jellies and not in the least way literary, still stocks bookmarks and fridge magnets that have lines from his writings. At 91, Bond is Landour’s unofficial ambassador, its hero, its North Star.
Sure, there have been places that have acquired great fame because of their writers. There’s Stratford-upon-Avon in England, the birthplace of Shakespeare. There’s Kabir Chaura, the neighbourhood in Banaras where the mystic grew up. Closer home, there’s Rabindranath Tagore who continues to shape thought and aesthetics and can be eponymously found everywhere in Kolkata. The subtle difference though, perhaps lies in the fact, that while most of these greats were somewhat of a posthumous phenomenon, Ruskin Bond continues to reside, live and breathe in Landour, his pen churning out and paying ode to the same mountains, the same birds, the same blossoms and the same deodars that have been his gaze, his muse for most of his writings. Though the India and the world that he grew up in can only be found in stories and archives today, his sensibilities have remained a constant.
I had never read Ruskin Bond as a child or a teenager. I happened to discover him, thanks to a friend’s copy of ‘Time stops at Shamli’ in college. She knew of my love for the hills and felt that I must try reading him. Her estimation was correct because sure enough, in these last three decades, my pile of Bond has only steadily grown and come to occupy an entire shelf of my bookcase.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly what makes him endure. His stories are not gripping in the sense of a whodunnit. His characters and plots have largely remained predictable and cut from the same cloth, across his prolific literary oeuvre. And yet, one goes back to re-reading one of his poems or stories every now and then, finding a certain comfort in them as one does in a simple, home-cooked meal that is familiar, nourishing and comforting. Even after seventy years of being a giant of a literary figure, Bond’s pen manages to be untainted by any cynicism, offering gentility in its entirety instead, be it its humour, its characters or its wisdom.
On the eve of his 91st birthday, as I walked past the stairs that led to his residence, I observed that there was no marble or stone plaque that announced his name. Neither did the house bear the title of a ‘cottage’. Just an unassuming flight of stairs that stood there in plain sight. Much like the legend, who has been standing his ground, serving us his signature sense and sensibilities.
Supriya Newar is a writer and poet from Calcutta. Besides being a music aficionado, she is also an avid traveller, particularly drawn to places that have a je ne sais quoi about them. She may be reached at connect@supriyanewar.com