With “Ruskin Bond: The Mussoorie Years…” Ganesh Saili documents the life
of a friend of four decades in a town both call home
For a change, this one’s on — not by — Ruskin Bond. In Ruskin
Bond: The Mussoorie Years… (Niyogi Books), Ganesh Saili puts
together a photo feature on the life of his friend of a few decades, “a
log of coming to Mussoorie, settling down here and finding home.” As
Saili tells us on the phone from Mussoorie, “I logged it from his
arrival in Musssoorie to today, which is about 43-odd years. And I
thought I would be the only guy who’d have a complete log of his
evolution as a writer and the different phases of his life — days in
Maplewood, days in Prospect Lodge, Saket and, finally, Ivy Cottage.” In
short, the settings of innumerable tales of humour and adventure become
the backdrop for another story, told by a person who’s hardly a stranger
to the places or the people inhabiting them.
A
result of two years’ effort by Saili, Ruskin Bond: The Mussoorie
Years…, while starting off with story of how the journey from
Delhi’s Rajouri Garden to Mussoorie happened, offers glimpses into
Bond’s brand of self-deprecatory humour and instances of freely
distributed generosity. But having already penned a book on Ruskin Bond
way back in 2004 — Ruskin: Our Enduring Bond — Saili turns to
photographs to take the story forward here. There are sepia images of a
just-born Bond from 1934, of childhood in Jamnagar, his parents’
wedding, of letters written from father to son, years in Delhi, and, of
course, with friends and extended family in the hills. Each photograph
accompanied by a brief description, occasionally interspersed with
quotes.
As Saili informs us, “Eighty per cent of the
pictures are my own. Apart from the family album, most of the pictures
have been taken by me at different periods. That way, even my
photography has grown with him.”
Saili’s no stranger
to telling stories through photographs, having worked on 30-odd books
already, mostly on Mussoorie and the Himalayas. For basing one on a
person, though, this is a first.
Biographies are a
tricky thing, due to expectations simultaneously sitting on opposite
ends of a scale — of personal insights that outsiders are not privy too,
of an objectivity that a friend cannot be logically expected to bring
in.
“It is a double-edged sword,” Saili says.
“However, the thing with Ruskin is, he’s a very simple person. There’s
nothing that one would brush under a carpet and try and forget. He’s
extremely giving, extremely helpful to younger writers. So many of us
owe it to him in the sense that he encouraged us to get going; ‘Chalo,
chalo, don’t worry about those pink rejection slips. Keep going, keep
going.’ Therefore there’s not much one can reveal as it were. He’s a
very private person, does his own thing. Stays out of political and
social circuits, happy to just sing his song and do his writing.
Therefore, it’s not difficult writing about him. There’s not much you’re
hiding. Or revealing, at the same time.”
He adds,
“Ruskin was a well-known figure way back in the 1960s, when his first
book (‘The Room on the Roof’) had come out, and he made a bit of a
splash in the The Illustrated Weekly of India. They were
serializing ‘The Room on the Roof’ 60 years ago and, therefore, he was
in his own right recognisable… We all looked up to Ruskin, we still look
up to him.”
What was his protagonist’s response to
the book? “A 95 per cent good job. He said, ‘As long as I see Nelson
Eddy and Laurel & Hardy on the posters in my house, you’ve done a
good job.’”
