Author

Ruskin Bond

Publisher

National Book Trust

Final Verdict

 3.5/5

About the Author

One of the most beloved Indian authors, Ruskin Bond is known for the simplicity in his writings that are targeted toward young readers and depict the inherent beauty of nature and human relationships. His stories are often set in the lofty Himalayan landscapes, and his stories continue to evoke nostalgia and warmth in readers of all ages.

Other Works By Ruskin Bond

The Blue Umbrella
The Room on the Roof
The Girl on the Train
Cherry Tree
The Night Train at Deoli

Schoolboy Fears and Literary Joys: The Adventures of Rusty by Ruskin Bond Review

Zoeb Matin reviews The Adventures of Rusty by Ruskin Bond (published by National Book Trust, 1995).

It is curious, sometimes, when one thinks of it just how a particular day in childhood could hold a little of both excitement and fear within the space of an hour. For us, at school, it was inevitably the day that followed the end of each term when we would be summoned, along with our parents, to the classroom to pore over the examination papers at term end. In that one hour before one reached the threshold of the classroom, one’s nerves would be fraught with fear – the fear of being scolded and, in the case of those unluckier than me, punished.

But a dose of exhilaration would soon cure that sickness of fear. Once the verdict of one’s academic performance was declared, and as I stepped out into the basement to see the sale of books put up for the boys, one would also forget the guilt of ignorance of some vernacular language or mathematics and instead wander around books spread out on desks borrowed from some derelict classroom – classics, books of horror and science fiction, comic-books and even books of quizzes and atlases carrying the advertisements for Bournvita and Milo.

Discovering Bond through The Adventures of Rusty

One could make the most unexpected discoveries in a book sale like this, and it was when hunting for some rare illustrated classic like The Black Arrow or The Island of Doctor Moreau that I found a nearly threadbare and thin paperback of The Adventures of Rusty by Ruskin Bond. I bought it, or rather coaxed my mother to buy it along with a book of Robin Hood’s adventures – even as my marks were hardly worth this gift – and that was how I first read a book of Mr Bond’s – an all-too-brief tryst that ended when, as it always happens, one outgrew an author with adolescence when the author himself refused to come of age.

Yet in that summer of new-found adolescence, simply threatening to break and spill out through the cracking veneer of innocence, The Adventures of Rusty held my attention in its slender grasp, even as my mind was already abroad galloping away with the Merry Men in Sherwood Forest or gallivanting with the likes of William Bligh and Robinson Crusoe.

Running Away

Perhaps that was why, even then, the latter part of the book, subtitled Running Away, which follows Rusty (who else?) and his friend Daljit on a nearly impossible scramble against time from their boarding school in the hills to the Western coast of India from where they dream of sailing for distant shores, did not quite stir me – it lacked, and still lacks, the real danger and suspense of a race against time that one had already found more exciting in Stevenson’s Kidnapped (even an encounter with a few rough dacoits is robbed of all its promise of danger, thanks to a kind-hearted thug who loosens their binds).

But, as in the books of Enid Blyton, the most memorable part of The Adventures of Rusty is unsurprisingly found in the unchanging landscape of Bond’s fiction—a quiet, almost sleepy, eternally idyllic town in the hills and the idiosyncratic characters that populate it.

Uncle Ken

The first half of the book, titled Uncle Ken, features some of Bond’s lightest, and thus most enjoyable, stories, all united by the presence of one of his most criminally overlooked creations–Uncle Kenneth Bond.

We cannot, of course, really guess as to how much this feckless but charmingly naïve loafer could be drawn from fact (Rusty’s fictional biography differs at many places on certain established facts). But for what they are worth, these six stories are to be enjoyed for their typically understated, at times even succinct wit.

We don’t quite get to know Rusty himself in these tales, but Uncle Ken, fond of his aunt’s (and Rusty’s gifted cook of a grandmother) roast duck and apple sauce, mostly without a job and with a penchant for whistling tunelessly, who also discovers within himself a knack to play a “classic late cut” at a charity match in Lucknow, is nevertheless endearing on his own.

Memorable Relatives in Literature

‘Well, the Maharaja never asked me if I’d been to the University. He asked me if I was at Cambridge, and I said no, I was at Oxford, which was perfectly true. He didn’t ask me what I was doing at Oxford. What difference does it make?’
– Ruskin Bond, The Adventures of Rusty

Literature is regretfully short of memorable relatives- Betsy Trotwood in Dickens’ bildungsroman, Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s greatest play, Aunt Agatha in Wodehouse’s comedies, and even Aunt Augusta Bertram in Greene’s great novel; one can count them on their fingers. Uncle Ken, much more than any other character by Bond, deserves at least a gracious mention.

Perhaps the most unique attribute of Bond’s simple, unhurried prose is its anecdotal quality, which lends it an honesty that compensates, as in the case of Somerset Maugham, for its lack of urgency.

The Enduring Myth of Rusty

In this regard, at least within our borders (for to deny Bond’s English identity is a disservice both to him and his lasting influence), he is the only writer who has consciously refrained from infusing a streak of radicalism in his prose since R.K. Narayan, a quality that particularly distinguished the older writer (as Greene, his life-long mentor and friend, too remarked) from the likes of Mulk Raj Anand and even Rabindranath Tagore.

Just as Malgudi has endured in our imagination as a self-contained universe, Bond’s milieu – Dehra, Landour and Mussoorie, with only summertime Delhi to counterweigh these towns – is both self-contained and familiar and thus so loved by his readers.

It was the hour of lizards. They had their reward for weeks of patient waiting. Plying their sticky pink tongues, they devoured insects swiftly. For hours, they crammed their stomachs, knowing that such a feast would not be theirs again for another season. Throughout the entire hot season, the insect world prepares for this flight out of darkness into light, and not one survives its bid for freedom.
– Ruskin Bond, The Adventures of Rusty

But there is a difference; if Narayan’s small town was brought alive by a rich wealth of short, slenderly wrought stories in the style of Hardy or De La Mare, of men, women and even children trying to get by in their humdrum lives, in spite of incidents, both gently comic and subtly tragic, Bond used his almost invariable landscape of any of these small towns in the hills, excluded from all the chaos of the cities and even the political upheavals sweeping across the country, to create, very successfully, the almost everlasting myth of Rusty, the protagonist of his first – and only fairly successful – novel of coming-of-age and calf-love, The Room On The Roof.

A myth can deviate and diverge in fact and consistency, and so, the story of Rusty alters in the aspect of his parentage, too, through the course of Bond’s prolific output of books—in one, his father is a Royal Air Force officer living in the outskirts of Delhi, and in the other, he is the manager of a tea estate in Assam.

These deviations do not discomfit us. What matters is that as long as we follow Rusty into any situation or adventure—meeting the ghosts of Sherlock Holmes and Rudyard Kipling, his literary idol, in London or reading Trollope like a true Englishman whilst espying on a students’ riot in Delhi—, we are able to enjoy his prosaic prose style.

Tongas, bullock-carts, cycles, rickshaws and cars, new, old and ancient, all struggled for advantage on the road. Any vehicle that had a horn blew it and anything which had a bell jangled it; and if you had neither horn nor bell, you used your vocal chords.
– Ruskin Bond, The Adventures of Rusty

We don’t quite feel the same pleasure for many of his characters, even not for Rusty’s friends, all of whom are bound to be estranged, but just as what Greene said about Maugham’s narrator Ashenden – a spy, a traveller and a writer all at the same time – we care simply for Rusty’s almost mythical role as part-narrator, part-protagonist in the simple stories and anecdotes that populate his books.

The Adventures of Rusty: A Characteristically Observational Work by Bond

And so, in The Adventures of Rusty, too, we are aware of how Rusty grows up from a nine-year-old boy, too happy finishing off his grandmother’s delicacies and even selling pickles to enthusiastic neighbours, both English and Indian, to help her buy the Christmas turkey, to the moody schoolboy yearning, in the fashion of Stevenson, to run away from the stifling boarding school of the very hills that he would love all his life, to discover the world.

I felt I was old enough now. I was sick of school and sick of my guardian. But that was not all. I was in love with the world, every corner of it, the places I had read about in books – the junks and sampans of Hong Kong, the palm-fringed lagoons of the Indies, the streets of London, the beautiful ebony-skinned people of Africa, the bright birds and exotic plants of the Amazon…
– Ruskin Bond, The Adventures of Rusty

It is an adventure almost certainly doomed to failure, but it nevertheless also gives us a glimpse of Bond’s real talent—not that of an adventure writer but rather that of a keen observer of both mankind and nature at business gifted with brevity.

Have you read this collection of simple, captivating stories that transport you to the idyllic hills and timeless world of Rusty? Share your thoughts in the comments below!