When it’s Ruskin Bond writing children’s fiction – scattered with facts and anecdotes from his own childhood – and the background is his beloved Dehra Dun, the expectations are unreasonably high.
That being a given, a book like Secrets, a collection of seven short stories – all vying to create the Bond magic in their own right, with elements ranging from innocence to romance to thriller and detective drama – disappoints on several counts.
At least three of the seven stories are found wanting in tautness of plot and the conclusions are flat and unconvincing. There are also several moments when you get the feeling that a great storyteller is descending into frivolity, creating bizarre possibilities in imitation of the drama that sells in popular commercial cinema.
For example, in the sixth story “The Late Night Show”, a man is killed in the cinema and Bond is the only one to see the murderer, who happens to bump into him on several occasions even after that. But it’s only one fine night that the killer decides he must also kill the young author. Displaying a fair amount of patience and utmost resolution, he keeps knocking on the door of Bond’s hotel room through the night. He manages to get the author out a little before dawn, chases him through jungles across gothic terrain, with a dagger in his hand, only to get himself locked up in an abandoned cowshed for days. And months later, when Bond returns to Dehra, he is petrified to see the murderer working in his mother’s hotel as a bartender — except that he has lost his memory and does not even recognise Bond.
However, when it comes to storytelling and ingenuous humour in the sub-plots of the various short stories, Bond surprises you with his ease of narration and sudden childlike mood switches.
Sample this: In the fifth story, “The Skeleton in the Cupboard”, Bond’s mother discusses the discovery of a bony human frame, through letters, with Ruskin, the boy-detective who is in boarding school and itching to come home and solve the mystery. He writes to his mum: “Thanks for the socks. But I wish you had sent a food parcel instead. How about some guava cheese?.... About that skeleton, if a dead body was hidden in the cupboard after 1930 – must have been, if the newspapers of that year were under the skeleton – it must have been someone who disappeared around that time or a little later....”
In response, he gets a parcel, which he describes in these words: “I soon received a parcel containing guava cheese, strawberry jam, and mango pickle. Headmaster confiscated the pickle. Maybe he needed it to heat his blood. A note enclosed with the parcel read: Old hotel registers missing. Must have been thrown out... Tirloki says a German spy stayed in the hotel just before the War broke out.”
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In the same breath, he is a demanding brat, a mature detective and an irritated schoolboy whose pickle has been confiscated.
Flaws apart, the book will attract the casual reader for the sheer variety and the easy read. The most mature of the seven stories, “Over the Wall”, is a true account from his own life, Bond admits in his introduction. It is a pithy observation of the pain, or the lack of it, through the eyes of a child who discovers that his long-disappeared neighbour had in fact been living in the confines of a cottage for years. He is a leper, a fearful sight, a gory image; and yet, the young author forms a bond with him that seems to linger beyond the pages of the book.
“Gracie” is a young man’s recollection of his adolescence, when he fell in love with a woman much older than him. This is interesting in the author’s depiction of the dichotomy between a boy’s largely innocent love and a man’s desires, and how the latter gives way to the former when he meets the woman years later in London.
Most of “At Green’s Hotel” grips a reader with its detective drama and twists and turns but loses its way and and the plot falls flat halfway through the story. Had it been some other author, the portrayal of Captain Ramesh as a conman might have looked convincing, but it does not gel very well with Bond’s style of writing, and the story becomes quite predictable towards the second half.
“A Tiger in the Lounge”, the last story of the book, is short and racy. Right from the start, it appears that Colonel Wilkie is waxing eloquent about his false bravado. And, his story is hardly credible even as Bond checks the burial register and declares that one Mr Busby “died of rabies caused by infected wounds. But there was no mention of a tiger!”
SECRETS
Ruskin Bond
Penguin Books
150 pages; Rs 250