Bond has a feel for the sub-Himalayan landscape at a level of detail that is exceptional in its sensitivity and sense of enchantment. Many writers have been obsessed with the grandeur of the Himalayas. “Sthavaranam Himalaya” — “among mountains, I am the Himalaya” — Vyaasa makes Lord Krishna himself say this in Chapter 10 of the Bhagavad Gita. Kalidasa in his Meghdoot says that the Himalayas are the rod to be used to measure the earth itself. But the sense of immediacy that Kipling brings to us when he describes Kim’s journey from Pinjore to Shimla is missing in Sanskrit writing. Ruskin Bond does one better than Kipling. He names plants, trees, flowers and birds and they come alive as his intimate friends. Bond’s short matter-of-fact description of the mongoose-cobra fight (as seen from his seat on the branch of the tree of course!) has to be one of the finest I have come across. The chill down my spine was comparable to the excitement I felt watching Ben Hur’s chariot race. In this description, which is tinged by 20th-century realism, not the world of 19th-century fables, he outdoes the master. Nothing in The Jungle Book comes close to this.

Bond’s vignettes of Delhi in the ’40s and ’50s are also first rate. The reader gets a feel for the embryo from which the present megapolis has grown. Although a trifle upset with the inexorable intrusion of more and more concrete into the Doon valley, Bond is not a shrill environmentalist Tory. His view is that “this too shall pass” and the hills will survive.

... contd.