Best of Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond

Description

This volume brings together the best of Ruskin Bond s prose and poetry. For over four decades, by way of innumerable novels, essays, short stories and poems, the author has mapped out and peopled a unique literary landscape. This anthology has selections from all of his major books and includes the classic novella Delhi Is Not Far.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351184249
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ruskin Bond

THE BEST OF RUSKIN BOND
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Dedication
Introduction

Love and Friendship : Short Stories

The Eyes Have It
The Thief
The Night Train at Deoli
The Photograph
My First Love
A Guardian Angel
The Kitemaker
My Father s Trees in Dehra
The Leopard
The Man Who was Kipling
The Last Time I Saw Delhi
From Small Beginnings
Would Astley Return?
The Funeral
The Room of Many Colours
The Girl from Copenhagen
Tribute to a Dead Friend
Tales of the Macabre

A Job Well Done
The Trouble with Jinns
He Said It with Arsenic
Hanging at the Mango-Tope
A Face in the Dark
From a Little Room : Essays and Vignettes

Life at My Own Pace
The Old Gramophone
A Little World of Mud
Adventures of a Book Lover
Upon an Old Wall Dreaming
A Golden Voice Remembered
At Home in India
Getting the Juices Flowing
Bird Life in the City
Home is Under the Big Top
Pedestrian in Peril
Escape to Nowhere
In the Garden of My Dreams
Owls in the Family
Adventures in a Banyan Tree
From My Notebook
Thus Spoke Crow
On the Road : Travel Writings

Ganga Descends
Beautiful Mandakini
The Magic of Tungnath
On the Road to Badrinath
Flowers on the Ganga
Mathura s Hallowed Haunts
Footloose in Agra
Street of the Red Well
Songs and Love Poems

Lost
Love Lyrics for Binya Devi
It isn t Time That s Passing
Kites
Cherry Tree
Lovers Observed
Lone Fox Dancing
Secondhand Shop in Hill Station
A Frog Screams
A Song for Lost Friends
Scenes from the Novels

Extract From A Flight Of Pigeons
Extract From The Room On The Roof
The Lafunga
Extract From Rosebud
Time Stops at Shamli
Time Stops at Shamli

Delhi is Not Far
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Footnotes
From Small Beginnings
From My Notebook
Ganga Descends
Lost
Extract From A Flight Of Pigeons
The Lafunga
Extract From Rosebud
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
The Best of Ruskin Bond
Ruskin Bond s first novel, The Room on the Roof , written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written a number of novellas, essays, poems and children s books, many of which have been published by Penguin. He has also written over 500 short stories and articles that have appeared in magazines and anthologies. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014.
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. As a young man, he spent four years in the Channel Islands and London. He returned to India in 1955. He now lives in Landour, Mussoorie, with his adopted family.
Praise for the Book
Bond s sentences are moist with dew and the mountain air, with charm, nostalgia and underplayed humour . . . [he is] our resident Wordsworth in prose. India Today
Bond is known for his seamless, gentle and lucid prose. . . . It takes Ruskin Bond to turn the ordinary into an extraordinary story. Tribune
Bond has the licence to thrill, and generations have been raised on his books, his ghost stories, his funny anecdotes, his warm, gentle wit. Today
There is an innate sensuality in the whole corpus. . . . Many feelings-of love, of lust, of joy, of hate, of disappointment, of bereavement, of exhilaration-are brought effortlessly alive. Asian Age
For Siddharth- Good luck, little one
Introduction
And when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful.
*
And here I am again, in my little room overlooking the winding road to Tehri, writing another Introduction.
No one has ever offered to write an Introduction for any of my books, and so, perforce, I must do my own.
Back in the 1950 s, when I wrote my first novel, unknown authors went around trying to get their more famous counterparts to write introductions for their books. Ever ready to oblige were men of the stature of Graham Greene, George Orwell, E. M. Forster and V. S. Pritchett. But I was far too shy to approach any or the greats . Moreover, I thought I was quite capable of standing up without any support. And although at times I have tottered, or come down with a loud thump, I think I have managed to maintain my independence, both as a writer and as an individual. Like the Jolly Miller of Dee, I care for nobody, no, not I-and nobody cares for me! I refer, of course, to introducers, celebrities, and the purveyors of literary criticism. A lot of other people have cared for me. Indeed, the stories and selected writings in this volume are testimonies to the many loving and caring people I have known over the years.
*
With the help of Anubha Doyle of Penguin India, I have made a fairly representative selection of my best writing, excluding my work for children which is well represented elsewhere. I have not made any selections from my non-fiction work, Rain in the Mountains (Viking, 1994), as this was published only recently.
The selection includes many of my early stories. Some are old favourites. Others (like the stories set in London) would be unfamiliar to most of my readers. I haven t written much about the years I spent in London (in the 1950 s) but I hope to rectify this omission before long. The essays are fairly recent. I have always enjoyed writing essays. An essay is built around a particular mood in the mind of the writer. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. (Alexander Smith, 1863)
What is the difference between an essay and a short story? It depends, I suppose, upon whose personality comes through more strongly, the author s or the characters he describes. If it is the author s, then it is really an essay. If it is the characters, then it is a story. Or is that too much of a simplification? In my own case, I have often found my stories becoming essays and vice-versa! One merges into the other. To communicate and be readable is, in the last resort, a matter of style.
People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are really alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.
When you talk you sound quite complicated, said a friend. And I had to explain that I ve spent forty years trying to simplify my style and clarify my thoughts!
Of course some people want literature to be difficult. And there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.
*
Also included here, on the suggestion of my publisher, is a complete short novel, Delhi Is Not Far , which is seeing the light of day for the first time.
In 1960, when I wrote it, there were no takers for short novels. Indian publishers would not touch fiction; and a novel had to be fairly long and substantial (or sensational) to find a publisher in Britain or America. Delhi was very low key. Another factor that went against it was the bisexual nature of its central character. After several rejections, the typescript went into a packing-case full of old papers and files and was forgotten for many years. Last winter, when I was emptying the box of its mildewed contents, I found the typescript and was about to toss it into the fire when my eye fell on the name of one of the characters for whom I d had a particular affection. I ll keep it for old time s sake, I said to myself. And browsing through its yellowed pages again, I decided that it had improved a bit with age. When I showed the novel to David Davidar, he suggested that I include it in this collection. So here it is, along with extracts from some of my other novels ( The Room on the Roof, Vagrants in the Valley, A Flight of Pigeons ), the opening chapters of one that has yet to be written ( Rosebud ), and some of my verse, including the long autobiographical poem, A Song For Lost Friends.
*
When I made the notes for this Introduction (I am still old-fashioned enough to make notes), it was just another misty September morning, the hillsides lush with monsoon foliage. By evening Mussoorie was under curfew.
Today, as I type this out, it is the fifth day of curfew, and the town has yet to recover from the tragedy that overtook it last week, on September 2, Mussoorie s Black Friday. Six citizens were shot dead and a police officer was lynched by a section of the crowd. For weeks the agitation had been allowed to continue unchecked. When the crackdown came, it was devastating.
Confrontations between demonstrators and the authorities are fairly commonplace throughout the country, the causes varying from one region to another. But it was the first time the hill-station had experienced this sort of thing. The middle of a fashionable Mall is the last place you d expect to find the dead, the dying and the wounded. The children s park wore the look of a battlefield, and the fountain, dry for months, was splashed with blood.
A curfew was the natural consequence, but no one expected it to last quite so long. On Sunday, the Jaunpuris-hill people from the outlying villages, largely unconcerned with politics and urban affairs-could not hold their annual Janmashtami fair, during which they take the image of Krishna in procession through the town. God Krishna could not bless Mussoorie this year. Perhaps he did not want to. The previous week, on Krishna s birthday, when it always rains heavily, there was