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Literary Review
Hilly Billy
RENAISSANCE aristocrats kept a notebook in which they scribbled memorable things they'd read. This notebook contained all the things the man thought exceptional: perversely, it was called the commonplace book. Ruskin Bond's Landour Days is something of a cross between a commonplace book, a diary, and a nature notebook.
While its printed version is attractively small, with lovely line drawings and nice binding, I wish I could see the original item. It is written in longhand he tells us, some of it sitting on "a steep hillside, waiting for the postman"; opening the notebook would perhaps release a dry shower of the wildflowers, with improbable names like commelina and agrimony, which he describes seeing on his walks.
Bond lives in Mussoorie, a place he describes in as much tender detail as a poet would his coy mistress. ("A hundred years should go to praise/ Thine eyes and on thy Forehead Gaze. / Two hundred to adore each Breast: But thirty thousand to the rest," Andrew Marvell had slyly written.) He talks with equal enjoyment of the ferns that grow by particular streams, the singing cricket, the walk down to Sisters Bazar; of other writers who populate those hills (Bill Aitken, Hugh Gantzer, Stephen Alter, and earlier, Dhiren Bhagat), of cruel reviews he has received, of Gurbachan, a taxi driver with an earth-shattering horn (with male and female tones). Though a little twee at times, this is a pleasant and unpretentious book for the holidays whether spent in the misery of baked plains or in a Landourian Parnassus.
Landour Days, A Writer's Journal, Ruskin Bond, Viking, Rs. 195.
ANURADHA ROY
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