Sighs of Our Times

So far as subject matter goes, of course, all this is familiar stuff to the Bond reader: Mussoorie-Landour’s resident chronicler has never tried segregating the fictional from the familial. Parents, grandparents, neighbours and friends people Bond’s writing with the ease born of long acquaintance, graced initially by their full names, at other times by just their first… you know them, right?

That is the specific delight of Roads to Mussoorie. Bond does not write of exalted personalities or exotic vistas, and though his terrain is officially the Uttaranchal Himalayas, anyone who has spent any length of time in the hills will recognise the oak and deodar forests he describes, the ‘‘diamond-cut air’’ and the buttercups and butterflies and birdsongs.

Using his blessed span of 71 years as a resource—the book was released on his birthday on May 19 — Bond meanders through memories, finding in each an anecdote to relate, a little fun to poke. All is grist that comes to his mill: visits to the cinema as a boy, and acquiring the permission to see movies free of charge after handing over a prized collection of gramophone records (this, after being subjected to one particular number ‘‘about a hundred times’’), drives to the plains and halts at wayside tea-stalls, walks through the hills and the trees outside the window.

And the people of course, from the redoubtable Ganesh Saili, companion of a thousand treks, and the wizened walnut-thief — whom the writer catches red-handed atop his tree and lets go out of sheer respect for her agility — to the canine-toothed Bhoot Aunty and historical personages who once made the hills their own. Remarkable among the last is Sir Proby Cautley, who conceived and built the Ganga canal in the mid-19th century, excavated fossils to prove the Siwaliks were once a swampland, wrote reports on a variety of fascinating subjects and then went Back Home quietly, just another anonymous empire-builder.

The Cautley story is typically Bond, the result, undoubtedly of hours spent poring over musty ledgers and cyclopaedias, yet stripped of all pretensions of research by being told in a simple, straight-forward language that talks about the subject, not its writer.

That is actually the line the author has maintained through all his writing — and it’s a line greatly endangered, along with the gentle humour and wry irony Bond has made his own. The lifestyle he espouses, of long walks and simple living, and his beloved hillsides are under threat as well; Bond may well be their last champion.

So this summer, savour the flavour of life as it is meant to be. Don’t leave home without Roads to Mussoorie.