A humble author and seven husbands

I love Ruskin Bond. When I first read about Rusty in his “Room on the roof” I wanted to write him a love letter. I was determined about posting it, to send it to his Mussourie home amidst vineyards and cool orchards. I have not searched for pictures of his home. I have imagined it in my mind; that is the kind of house I would love him to live in. I wrote about myself, about the warm feeling which his eyes set in me every time I turn to see his little portrait on the back of his books. I wrote some more about my hatred for fishes, about the guy I loved, about my wishes to spray-paint the walls of neighbouring houses, about my thoughts on photographs. And in the urgency to divulge many a thing, the letter went on and on but never really went to the place it was supposed to reach.

In time the letter started to become yellow and stiffened, crumbling into folds that have now set deep gorges across it. From the status of a letter it elevated to that of a scrapbook which held emotions burgeoning out of the many phases I found in life. The day they sold my bicycle I wrote to him how a part of childhood depleted like brittle sand. Now that the days of watching the neighbourhood riding its crooked paths were over I wished to go beyond the places where the bicycle could possible take me. Another time, it was night if I can recall, I chose to write that I was scared of shadows creeping out of us, taller than we can ever be. I wrote about days that seemed less hopeful than others, I borrowed accounts from stories that were not mine to tell. In all the veracity I was trying to portray, I kept running in circles on a green pasture which seemed like the only place of hope I could travel to. Every night I would slide the letter beneath my bed after adding one or two lines until one day a virulent procrastination gripped me. I was less enthused, less bemused than before. I felt few things in my fist, and even fewer things to write about.

Last night I picked up a Ruskin Bond book after a whole year. I have missed his gentle boggy eyes, soaked in a lukewarm love. But a year has gone by. I have lost a lot of vigour I had before, to run away like Rusty. Few of those dreams that gyrated around me all the time have now sublimated. I now eye for the more possible, more achievable destinations. Misty mountains have been replaced by California blues, let us suppose, or Scottish farms by Goan churches. Last night was one of those nights when nothing happened, last night had on it the burden of normalcy or the sadness of not being exceptional, not standing out of its clan. Last night failed to bring back old lovers or new ones. Deserted by both memory and belief last night seemed like an itinerary, travelled a million times before, with no new promise to offer. And on such a banal night I read a story of love, of betrayal of murderous fit, unfaithful husbands and a black spider. I wonder how the author who has been my constant source of hope and beauty for fifteen years changed his path. Of how the author who wrote about seeing his dead father by the riverside has traversed the desolate corridors of a woman of ruthless kind. The author who would speak about enchantment was suddenly talking about remorse, about vicious anguish, about all that was dark amidst the marshy forests of his Mussourie.

For a while my faith in him felt desecrated. The sunshine which I saw in him seemed to have left. Let there be one author for eternal hope, I have always prayed and there he was, in the letters of his book, in the blackness of a ghastly love, with the optimism he induced in everything now ephemeral like the smoke rings coming from cigarettes. And when the fervour of heart was over, there came an urge to revisit all that I have gone through in this blasphemous night. Somehow I could not contain in me the idea of my faith in him shattering this way.

With rationales I started afresh, contemplating all that I observed. And then I learned like I have always learnt from him. That his trees still grow in Dehra unlike I have envisaged. That faith might divert its course for a while and yet remain the faith it was. It might seem adamant and bewildering for the time and yet find its way to be loyal. And as I let go of my fatuous stubbornness with a sigh, we, I and his coolness, bonded like lovers.

A bird sang from a distant perch on midnight, long after I have stopped hearing Simon & Garfunkel on Jango....!!
With that I fetched my old letter from under my bed.