(Puffin Books, 2020)
The Room on the Roof, the timeless classic of adolescence and recipient of the John Llewellyn Memorial Prize in 1957, was written by Ruskin Bond when he was merely seventeen. The book is based on the story of his sixteenth year — 1947 — the year he finished school and set sail for England to become a writer. The present memoir, being fourth in a series of memoirs about the writer’s boyhood days, describes wistfully his last year in Dehra before he moved to Blighty (only to finally come back to India two years later).
Sixteen is a wonderful age to be in. It’s the gateway from youth to adulthood. And it comes once in a lifetime. Ruskin Bond evokes it, treasures it, holds it close to his heart. As the year, so the book. “It’s about love, friendship, writing, teaching, learning, playing, dreaming, hoping and just being sixteen”, notes Bond truthfully in the book’s Introduction.
Bond is one relieved soul after finishing school at Bishop Cotton’s in Shimla and comes to live with his mother, stepfather and two younger half-brothers in Dehradun. He soon succumbs to ennui and to ward off loneliness he starts walking all over Dehra: “I walked a lot. Sometimes, I walked with my head up, observing. Sometimes, I walked with my head down, thinking. And sometimes, I just stared into space, daydreaming. The neighbours called me a road inspector.”
The restless boy goes to cinema two to three times a week. He becomes a member of a lending library only to devour a lot of popular fiction - P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier. In the evenings he likes to tune into BBC’s overseas programme. Not particularly fond of the game of cricket, he likes listening to cricket commentaries. “The commentaries were very skillful at drawing you into a game and making it interesting, and I found myself hooked to them”, Bond writes.
He also gets infatuated with Raj (short for Rajeshwari), the sister of his friend Ranbir, two years his senior. She’s a BA student and her college’s badminton champion. She’s quite affectionate towards her yonger brother’s mate though, and lavishes Rusty with his favourite paratha with an assortment of pickles. Bond’s fondness for paratha and pickle becomes stuff of legend among friends who start calling him ‘Paratha Bond’. He learns badminton from Raj, plays with her, and keeps happily losing to her.
Meanwhile he keeps writing for a Madras based periodical and receives five rupees apiece of remuneration through money order. Bond also gets published during the time in the prestigious Illustrated Weekly of India and gets paid a princely sum of fifty rupees. Before finally sailing for England by the year end, Bond takes up the job of a private tutor: “It’s much easier being an author than tutor. A writer has only to deal with his own muddled mind. A tutor has to deal with countless minds, some cuddled, some muddled, some befuddled.”
Once finished, the reader might as well start looking back nostalgically to his ‘good old days’ of boyhood. As I myself did, yearning for my own halcyon days of adolescence and readily finding points of commonality with Ruskin Bond’s.
The book turns out to be an exquisite one-sitting read, fit to be had along with tea and fritters on a monsoon afternoon.The review has been done by Ajay Kumar Singh who’s a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. He is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading.
