Friends in Small Places...

Friends in Small Places

I have just started reading a book by this name by Ruskin Bond. It is an assortment of stories and anecdotes about people he has met and known over the course of his life. And it makes for delightful reading. In a way, it takes me back to childhood. There is certain innocence in his writing style as well as in the type of stories he writes. Small town tales and quirky characters. The most endearing aspect, however, is the innate humanity that shines through all these stories together with an undercurrent of humour. These are tales that come with a moral, but one that is subtly expressed with no overtones of righteousness.

The teacher who gives fake pass certificates to his students so that they are not held back due to some ‘puny’ exam; the inspector who lets go a 14 year old girl who, in innocence, had killed a Rani; the watchman of a train tunnel, deep in a forest, whose job is to watch that the tunnel is safe for the train to pass through and who is ‘a firefly’ for the traveling hundreds.

Each story comes with an air and scent of small town India, the India that now seems to be rapidly succumbing to the advent of the mall and PVR culture, to an age where we are abreast with happenings around the world but have no clue about our neighbours, to a mindset where success is defined in terms of salary and designations or (as friend of mine calls them) – tags. Somehow, contentment seems to be, at the very least an undesirable trait and at its worst- a vice.

To come back to the book, some stories effectively bring out the stark contrast in the absolute change in the pace of life and its attendant changes. People now have no time to develop harmless quirks and twists in their characters and personalities. Mehmood the old kite maker (in a story by the same name) reminiscences about the old days when ‘there was time to spend an idle hour with a gay, dancing strip of paper. He compares those days to the modern ones when ‘everyone (is) hurried in a heat of hope and delicate things like kites and daydreams get trampled underfoot.’

There is the Uncle Ken, “who would undoubtedly agree that – ‘where would we be without losers?”’. There is Prem Singh, a true son of the hills. He comes to the author asking for a job, but it’s a long time (and many other jobs) before he finally comes and works for him. He goes out to try his luck in the big wide world. Bidding adieu to him the author thinks- ‘another nice person I probably wont see again; another ship passing in the night, the friendly twinkle of its lights vanishing in the darkness.’ However, this is not how things turn out. After a while Prem is back. And the author realizes that – ‘hill men do not disappear forever. The spirit haunted rocks do not let their people wander too far, lest they lose them forever’.

The author also briefly touches upon the subject of romance, with Biniya. She of the ‘fair, round thighs and strong legs; with the rain streaming down her face as she climbs the hill to call the white cow home’.

There is a great attention to detail in the novel, be it attention to physical details, emotional details or psychological insights.