I’m a railway enthusiast. My favourite haunt for train-spotting was a relative’s house by the railway track where, whenever we visited them, I would scamper away to the roof and wait for a train to rumble past. Not surprisingly, all my life I preferred a train journey to any other. I travelled extensively to meet my favourite writers in far-away places, and during the journeys many interesting things happened. Let merecount a few such incidents.
Reading Secrets (2011) by Ruskin Bond brings to mind Nocturne (2010) by Kazuo Ishiguro. The similarity in their choice of the locale from where the stories take off strikes one as an afterthought. Kazuo situates all his five stories in hotels in an unnamed Italian city. The pick of hotels and houses in Dehradun as the backdrop of all the seven stories of Bond is appositely reflected in the cover design that depicts a spectral-looking palace, apparently depeopled, as if housing a mine of painful secrets.
One early morning in Gangtok, out on the breakfast terrace doubling up as a sun-bathing spot in a hotel, I was privy to a strangely uplifting sight. High up in the sea-blue sky, there’s something like a long, curved steel blade of a sword luminous like a brilliant cut diamond. It disappeared after a few minutes. On enquiry I came to know it’s the cone of the Kachenjunga.
The world’s largest free literary festival JLF was still five years away when I met writer Namita Golchale for the first time. In a letter dated 15 January 2001, in response to my note which I had courier ed a week earlier, she wrote: “I would be happy to meet you during your visit to Delhi. Please give me a call upon your arrival and we will fix up a mutually convenient time.”
On an August morning in 2001, my phone rang. As I said “Hello”, a professorial voice came on the line “Swapan babu speaking”? “Yes please!” “I’m Manoj Das here, speaking from Sri Aurobindo Ashram opposite Kenilworth Hotel, Kolkata. Your letter addressed to my Pondicherry home has been redirected. I’ll be hem for a few more …
In Snow, a novel by Nobel prizing-winning author Orhan Pamuk, there’s this central character named Ka, a poet and a journalist, who unerringly senses when a poem dawns on him. Like the birth of a child, it may be not only at odd hours but at odd places too, and it has to be attended to. So wherever he is at that moment, he somehow makes a little room for himself, and scratches away on a piece of paper non-stop until the natural birth of the poem is complete.
After the imposition of the lockdown following the second wave of COVID-19, the streets of the towns now swarm with vendors selling all sorts of daily needs, particularly in the morning, as people have mostly gone indoors, stepping out only when it’s absolutely necessary.
Ruskin Bond, who turned eighty-six on May 19, 2020, is one of the few writers who never bothered abut fame. Putting his pen to paper, he narrates stories that are delightful and meaningful. He is one of India’s most prolific wirters, whose work has touched the lives of millions of people – children and adults alike.
Have you ever been in a bookshop looking for a title and ended up buying a different one? Or does it ever happen to you when you visit your favourite library that some books in particular stacked in open shelves placed at the far corners hidden from your immediate visual range silently beckon you to pick them up and carry them home and cohabit with them for a few weeks? Or, for that matter, you visit a book fair with an ardent love for books that have sustained you through a rather difficult time—having no idea what to expect?
It’s not humans alone you fall in love with at first sight. There are places-sometimes almost in your backyard – that could leave you similarly smitten. We recently visited the wondrous Kalimpong town, and were blown away by two of its state-run lodges and their unique environment.
