Ruskin Bond’s latest memoir, A Town Called Dehra, is beautifully written. It is set mostly in Dehra Dun, although other places do intrude (Shimla, Delhi). It starts in the ’40s and in a delicious meandering way comes down to present times without any rigid chronological pattern. A stream-of-consciousness memoir written with a tight discipline that helps to make it look easy. It is in the best traditions of English prose. I was reminded of Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. The gentle non-intrusive implicit moralising can also take us back to Walton’s Compleat Angler. There is an episode where Bond as a young boy sits on a branch of a banyan tree from where he reads his treasured books and observes the world go by. This reminded me of a Robert Frost poem where a boy plays with the branch of a tree. It also reminded me of Jeremy Finch in To Kill a Mocking Bird. When England has been bombed out, Dickens’s pubs will be remembered. When the great socialist government of Uttarakhand has destroyed Dehra Dun, Ruskin Bond’s town will still be there.

Bond is literally an orphan of the Raj. His British father dies just around the time World War II is ending and India is moving towards independence. His father’s plans of “taking him back” to Britain can no longer be pursued. His father had been the young Bond’s best friend and companion. An insensitive schoolmaster promises to store his “father’s letters” safely for the small boy and then proceeds to lose them quite callously. The heartbreak in not only losing his father but losing his father’s letters as well is captured without a touch of the maudlin. The book has a Merchant-Ivory Shakespearewallah touch that mingles with the world seen through the eyes of a “different” boy.

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