Review: Song of the Forest by Ruskin Bond

Song of the Forest is a collection of some of the best recent fiction by Ruskin Bond. While it is always a pleasure to read Mr Bond, that pleasure is also accompanied by pangs of inadequacy not just at his writing prowess but at his charmed life or at least the life imagined in this collection. For where else will you come across mysterious encounters in a garden, lost lovers who return, doppelgangers that chase you, pests that keep returning to steal chocolate, apartments frequented by the ghosts of their owners, hare brained get-rich schemes that involve capturing monitor lizards for their potency-increasing oil and a bank manager and a baker out to hunt a man-eating leopard? Apart from this Mr Bond also manages to stumble upon a king’s ransom in jewels, outruns the law, escapes his own murderer, “takes care” of his mother’s paramour, survives prohibition, and ends up drinking with a descendant of the Bonnie Prince Charles.

Most of the collection is centered around Fosterganj and we are introduced to its residents, all of whom are interesting in myriad ways while occupied in mundane occupations. “You can’t really change people… If, like Sunil, you have a tendency to pick pockets, that tendency will always be there… If like Foster, you have spent most of your life living on the edge of financial disaster, you will always be living on the edge. If, like Hassan, you are a single minded baker of bread and maker of children, you won’t stop doing either. If, like Vishaal, you are obsessed with leopards, you won’t stop looking for them.” It is here that Bond reminds us that there is no small town that isn’t capable of drama, and no mountain village that can truthfully be labelled ‘quiet and peaceful’.

This collection includes some of Ruskin Bond’s most confident writing. It is cheeky and playful and yet there is such brevity that not a line feels out of place, not an adjective seems indulgent. Sample this: “Sher Singh was my milkman. Early every morning he trudged up the hill from his village, three miles distant, to deliver his milk to two or three homes on the hillside. On the way he watered it a little at a roadside hydrant; but it was good milk, once you removed some of the grass that floated around in the can.” The reader might think the funny bit is the mixing of the hydrant water but the grass is the actual kicker.

Song of the Forest is perhaps best summed up by the story that chronicles, in hilarious detail, the effects of a local still on the tiny mountain town of Landour: a respectable headmistress runs off with a muleteer, a vice admiral performs a sailor’s jig, a judge sleeps with the dhobi’s sister, and the padre has a burst appendix. Bond’s work, like Sher Singh’s hooch, lights a small fire in the belly. It strengthens and uplifts. It is like firewater for the soul; it feels too good to be legal and promptly provides inspiration for mischief.

But there is another side to this collection. A side stoically grounded in the tragedy of human failings, those of Bond’s own life. With an objective hand he writes of the dissolution of his parent’s marriage, “When he (Bond’s father) took a holiday, he went in search of rare butterflies. My mother was a butterfly too — pretty, merry, fluttering here and there — but most unwilling to be displayed in a butterfly museum.” His subsequent years at boarding school and even the death of his father is written with pity for the young schoolmaster who must shoulder the onerous burden of communicating this and the uncertainty of the future to Bond. It also involves tiffs with racist uncles and lovers lost due to political differences. Then there are his own struggles as a young writer constantly moving between homes, cities, and countries. “And so, with my new suitcase in my right hand, and the typewriter in my left hand, I boarded the ferry for Southampton, and eight hours later found myself on the train to London — without a job, without a home to go to, and with a half-written novel as my only asset.”

Bond’s early childhood memories of Jamnagar — a fascinating glimpse of Indian history — are another reason to treasure this collection. His father taught at the Palace School, and his students were the children of the Jam Sahib or the Maharaja of Jamnagar. Bond’s childhood days were spent avoiding haircuts, taking rides with the princes in their Tiger Moth aeroplane, and winding up the gramophone to play grand operas while his father tended to his stamp collection and his mother to her pickles. To think that on the palace grounds of Jamnagar there was a tiny house that blasted Caruso, Chaliapin, and the operas of Puccini!

Song Of The Forest is an enduring read and one that rightly should be put at the bar rather than in a bookcase. For what better pick-me-up could there be for long charmless days in the city?

Percy Bharucha is a freelance writer and illustrator with two biweekly comics, The Adult Manual and Cats Over Coffee. Instagram: @percybharucha

Song of the Forest is a collection of some of the best recent fiction by Ruskin Bond. While it is always a pleasure to read Mr Bond, that pleasure is also accompanied by pangs of inadequacy not just at his writing prowess but at his charmed life or at least the life imagined in this collection. For where else will you come across mysterious encounters in a garden, lost lovers who return, doppelgangers that chase you, pests that keep returning to steal chocolate, apartments frequented by the ghosts of their owners, hare brained get-rich schemes that involve capturing monitor lizards for their potency-increasing oil and a bank manager and a baker out to hunt a man-eating leopard? Apart from this Mr Bond also manages to stumble upon a king’s ransom in jewels, outruns the law, escapes his own murderer, “takes care” of his mother’s paramour, survives prohibition, and ends up drinking with a descendant of the Bonnie Prince Charles.

Most of the collection is centered around Fosterganj and we are introduced to its residents, all of whom are interesting in myriad ways while occupied in mundane occupations. “You can’t really change people… If, like Sunil, you have a tendency to pick pockets, that tendency will always be there… If like Foster, you have spent most of your life living on the edge of financial disaster, you will always be living on the edge. If, like Hassan, you are a single minded baker of bread and maker of children, you won’t stop doing either. If, like Vishaal, you are obsessed with leopards, you won’t stop looking for them.” It is here that Bond reminds us that there is no small town that isn’t capable of drama, and no mountain village that can truthfully be labelled ‘quiet and peaceful’.

This collection includes some of Ruskin Bond’s most confident writing. It is cheeky and playful and yet there is such brevity that not a line feels out of place, not an adjective seems indulgent. Sample this: “Sher Singh was my milkman. Early every morning he trudged up the hill from his village, three miles distant, to deliver his milk to two or three homes on the hillside. On the way he watered it a little at a roadside hydrant; but it was good milk, once you removed some of the grass that floated around in the can.” The reader might think the funny bit is the mixing of the hydrant water but the grass is the actual kicker.

Song of the Forest is perhaps best summed up by the story that chronicles, in hilarious detail, the effects of a local still on the tiny mountain town of Landour: a respectable headmistress runs off with a muleteer, a vice admiral performs a sailor’s jig, a judge sleeps with the dhobi’s sister, and the padre has a burst appendix. Bond’s work, like Sher Singh’s hooch, lights a small fire in the belly. It strengthens and uplifts. It is like firewater for the soul; it feels too good to be legal and promptly provides inspiration for mischief.

But there is another side to this collection. A side stoically grounded in the tragedy of human failings, those of Bond’s own life. With an objective hand he writes of the dissolution of his parent’s marriage, “When he (Bond’s father) took a holiday, he went in search of rare butterflies. My mother was a butterfly too — pretty, merry, fluttering here and there — but most unwilling to be displayed in a butterfly museum.” His subsequent years at boarding school and even the death of his father is written with pity for the young schoolmaster who must shoulder the onerous burden of communicating this and the uncertainty of the future to Bond. It also involves tiffs with racist uncles and lovers lost due to political differences. Then there are his own struggles as a young writer constantly moving between homes, cities, and countries. “And so, with my new suitcase in my right hand, and the typewriter in my left hand, I boarded the ferry for Southampton, and eight hours later found myself on the train to London — without a job, without a home to go to, and with a half-written novel as my only asset.”

Bond’s early childhood memories of Jamnagar — a fascinating glimpse of Indian history — are another reason to treasure this collection. His father taught at the Palace School, and his students were the children of the Jam Sahib or the Maharaja of Jamnagar. Bond’s childhood days were spent avoiding haircuts, taking rides with the princes in their Tiger Moth aeroplane, and winding up the gramophone to play grand operas while his father tended to his stamp collection and his mother to her pickles. To think that on the palace grounds of Jamnagar there was a tiny house that blasted Caruso, Chaliapin, and the operas of Puccini!

Song Of The Forest is an enduring read and one that rightly should be put at the bar rather than in a bookcase. For what better pick-me-up could there be for long charmless days in the city?

Percy Bharucha is a freelance writer and illustrator with two biweekly comics, The Adult Manual and Cats Over Coffee. Instagram: @percybharucha