Book: Lone Fox Dancing- My Autobiography
Author: Ruskin Bond
Pages: 277
Read on: Kindle
Read in: ~3 hours
Plot Summary: Over sixty years, for numerous readers—of all ages; in big cities, small towns and little hamlets—Ruskin Bond has been the best kind of companion. He has entertained, charmed and occasionally spooked us with his books and stories and opened our eyes to the beauty of the everyday and the natural world. He has made us smile when our spirits are low and steadied us when we’ve stumbled. Now, in this brilliantly readable autobiography—his book of books—one of India’s greatest writers shows us the roots of everything he has written.
He begins with a dream and a gentle haunting, before taking us to an idyllic childhood in Jamnagar by the Arabian Sea—where he composed his first poem—and New Delhi in the early 1940s—where he found material for his first short story. It was a brief period of happiness that ended with his parents’ separation and the untimely death of his beloved father. A search for companionship and security, undercut by a fierce independence and a tendency for risk-taking, would inform every choice he made for the rest of his life.
With effortless intimacy and candour, Bond recalls his boarding school days in Shimla and winter holidays in Dehradun, when he tried to come to terms with a sense of abandonment, made friends, discovered great books and found his true calling. Determined to be a writer, he spent four difficult years in England, from 1951 to 1955 and he writes poignantly of his loneliness there, even as he kept his promise to himself and produced a book—the classic novel of adolescence, The Room on the Roof. It was born of his longing for ‘the atmosphere that was India’—the home he would return to even before the novel was published, taking a gamble that would prove to be the best decision he made.
In the final, glorious section of the autobiography, he writes about losing his restlessness and settling down in the hills of Mussoorie, surrounded by generous trees, mist and sunshine, birdsong, elusive big cats, new friends and eccentrics—and a family that grew around him and made him its own. Full of anecdote, warmth and gentle wit; often deeply moving and always with a magnificent sense of time and place—and containing over fifty photographs, some of them never seen before Lone Fox Dancing is a book of understated, enduring magic, like Ruskin Bond himself.
Things I Liked:
1. Things I'd like to get out of the way at the outset, we (my sister and I) are huge Ruskin Bond fans. Like it says in the 'plot summary' section above, he has been our friend and companion in adventure, laughs and tears for over thirty odd years. So, obviously, we simply had to read his autobiography to learn more about the man behind some of our favourite books. Obviously, we loved this book! If you're someone who has grown up reading Ruskin Bond, you'll love this book- his most open, heartbreaking and moving work!
2. The book starts with Mr. Bond's earliest childhood memories- of his years as a little boy in the princely state of Jamnagar. We get to see the life of a little boy, who was loved and fussed over by his ayah and other staff, his close relationship with his father, recollections of the small schoolroom, which he attended along with the royal children, his socialite mother, who was too busy for her children and, from that early age, his deep love of stories of all kinds.
3. The next few years of Ruskin Bond's life were very eye opening and devastatingly heartbreaking. If you've read the Rusty books, you, like me, would've possibly thought that those stories were semi-autobiographical, given their setting in Dehradun. I always imagined Ruskin Bond having this fun, adventurous and hilarious childhood, but the truth is quite, quite different, which actually explains a lot about his Rusty books.
4. Ruskin Bond's writing is so sublime that he effortlessly brings to life the people, places and accompanying emotions of his experiences, so that we feel everything he felt as a lonely young man in England, his yearning for the colours, sounds and people of India, his friendships in Dehradun, Delhi, Shimla and Mussoorie. His early 20s make for some excellent reading.
5. I also immensely enjoyed the Mussoorie and Landour years- the pets he had, the bonds he formed, how his writing got the kind of acclaim that it deserves. Also, how he formed a family of his own is a lovely little story all on its own.
6. Basically, this book is a must-read. Irrespective of being a Ruskin Bond fan, this is a very interesting story of a man, who is so unique in so many ways. His life is a fantastic example of 'feeling Indian' even if one is born into a British Caucasian-Anglo Indian family in an India that was newly independent. It is the story of overcoming introversion, loneliness and leaving an easy life in a the first world for the chaos and warmth of the third world. It is the journey of one of India's most prolific writers and what a journey it has been! Read this book!
Rating: 5/5
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