Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography

Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography 

- Ruskin Bond

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the greatest regrets of my reading journey is not finding Ruskin Bond in my childhood. Where I grew up, I had very limited access to reading material beyond school library and Russian books from Mir and Raduga, and later on, my father's collection. So, even though I might have heard of Ruskin Bond during my student life, I didn't get to read one of his books until I moved to NCR for work. I fell in love with his writing, simple but delightful, and with a timeless charm. I keep on repeating myself, but I can't get over the fact that his writing makes me feel nostalgic for the times I haven't lived in, for the places I haven't been to.

I have read some of his 'Rusty' books, and also 'The Room on the Roof', which if not exactly semi-autobiographical, provide a glimpse into his early life. And I was very curious to know more about his life as a child, how and where he grew up, and how he came to spend his entire life in India. Therefore, when his autobiography came out, it went into me to-read list immediately. I purchased it a few months back, but I was in a sort of reading slump, so didn't pick it up until last week. But once I started reading it, I found it hard to put down ... it is not a keep-you-on-the-edge thriller, it is just so enchanting, that it pulls you in and keeps you there.

What I love most about his writing is, that it is simple, and the charm lies is what he tells you, and how he tells it. I don't know if anyone else has written in such a rich manner about the small hill towns ... that makes you feel that you are seeing it all with your own eyes, traveling those roads with him .... perhaps the only thing missing to make the experience complete is the cool pine-scented air. I loved his description of the life in early 1900's in the princely state of Jamnagar, in the hill towns of of Dehradoon and Shimla. He describes his troubled childhood with candor, also his grief at separation and loss of his father; it is heartbreaking, but because you feel empathy for that lonely child, not because he wallows in self-pity as he writes it. I also found a new insight into the lives of British people at the time of Indian Independence ... many of them also suffered - as usual, the poorest of them, who had spent all their lives in India, had rarely or never been to England, and now were left with no means and no country of their own. Through his words, you can see the changing life through almost a century, his own circumstances from privilege to poverty to struggle to well-deserved fame, the changing face of hill stations and the benefits as well as the cost of development.

He turned down the chance of a comfortable life in England, and quit a well-paying job in Delhi, to follow his dream. He remained a struggling writer for many decades, but the world is definitely richer for it.