No reader has ever escaped the bewitching charm of Ruskin Bond stories.
A British by origin but an Indian at heart, Ruskin ‘Owen’ Bond is loved by both children and elders alike. His narration keeps the child within alive which I consider is an exceptionally rare gift to be blessed with.
Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography is a treat for Bond lovers.
Filled with witty and humorous anecdotes from his childhood, disheartening after-effects of World War-II and India-Pakistan partition on the personal lives of those around him, his years of utter loneliness, his adoption of a family, and foremost, his boundless love for nature which has been revealed right in the beginning (prologue) of his memoir as follows:
As are the trees, my brothers. I have walked among them, feeling I am a part of the forest; I have put out my hand and touched the grey bark on an old tree, and its leaves have brushed my face, as if to acknowledge me.
The most moving of all elements in Ruskin’s life is his boundless love for his father and the bond that the father- son duo shared. Neither the war nor the partition, I think, had affected him as adversely as his father’s uncertain death did and maybe that’s why he has very precisely given us an insight of how the mass men-killing had affected others much and him, little. Though he mostly lived a lonely life, yet his life has always been full of chirpy bundles of amusement be it his childhood ‘ayah-papaya’, the great story-teller khansama, his quite friend Azhar, the picking Mr Fischer & Mrs Fischer, and last but not the least his loving family.
Mr Bond has yet again marvellously narrated his stories from the eye of a 10-year old child, a movie- buff teenager, a lone author, and finally as a grandfather of 3. He calls himself a gapori of sort. I’d agree. However, he is not just a gapori but the dearest of all ‘gaporis’.