The Songs of Life

Ruskin Bond is perhaps undoubtedly India’s favourite short story writer and novelist. From children to young adults and grown-ups, there is no category that is left untouched and unmoved by his stories—through the easy-flowing style and the languid descriptions that transport the reader into the mountains of Landour or the hills of Dalhousie or into the surrounding forests, with their accompanying ‘songs’. David Davidar, in the foreword to this collection calls Bond ‘ambidextrous’—a perfect word to describe the man whose oeuvre has mesmerized and influenced at least three generations of readers.

This short story collection is termed as ‘the very best of the master’s short fiction in the 21st century’. There is no single theme as such—it is stories from ‘here, there, and everywhere’, all written over the past ten years or so. Like a long meandering river, the collection transports us from a forest in the outskirts of Mussoorie, to Bond’s homely location of Landour, where he has spent a major part of his life to the hills of Dalhousie and the plains of Dehradun and even to ‘outdoor locations’ like Jersey in the Channel Islands or Kathmandu in Nepal. Indeed, the flavour and the essence of these locations have played a major part in enhancing the quality and the impact of these stories.

Let us begin with the first story, also the titular one. ‘Song of the Forest’ is full of onomatopoeic sounds—the ‘shrill sounds’ of the cicadas, the sounds of the water from a stream tumbling over the rocks, gossiping magpies, the sound of the gentle breeze, a barking deer on the run from a predator or even the ‘sawing cough’ of a leopard. It is a glimpse of another world, yet a rapidly changing world in which forests are being destroyed in the name of development, where roads are being constructed right through the forest.