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METROSCAPE
Bond
Free
By Ravi Shankar
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| STORYTELLERS: Ruskin
Bond (seventh from right) with fellow writers in Mussoorie (top);
with Kapoor at the Writer's Bar |
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The Savoy in Mussoorie
must be the only hotel, apart from the Raffles in Singapore, to have a
thing about writers. While at the Raffles Somerset Maugham sipped Singapore
slings, the Savoy's bar was Kipling's favourite watering hole. So, it
was quite kismet when publisher Pramod Kapoor of Roli Books and author
Namita Gokhale, who has an imprint with him, hosted the Ruskin Bond Festschrift-a
Writers' Retreat in honour of that gentle Indian Roald Dahl, Ruskin Bond.
Festschrift means an offering to a Master, and
the Writer's Bar in Mussoorie where the first session was held had the
phantom odours of vellum and old tales. On the wall, mounted plates proclaim
the famous drinkers who once sipped there-Pearl Buck, Jim Corbett, Stephen
Alter-prompting some to grumble about the absence of famous names at the
conclave.
The hotel is a relic of the Empire, a great
gothic edifice with a gravel-rough courtyard and green casement windows
below turrets soaring skyward. A jovial Ruskin Bond presided over the
scribblers who had travelled from Delhi, Dehradun and Paris under Gokhale's
eagle eye to gather for two days of story telling, poetry reading and
ideation. Outside, while a fire, encouraged by period furniture from the
hotel, roared and a fingernail moon lent its pale inducement, dream reader
Madhu Tandon spoke of the subconscious while the rest nibbled tortillas.
Later, in Kapoor's colonial house named after the Welsh saint Asaph, the
retreaters gathered on the grass in the shade of conifer and rhododendron
to pursue Pavan Varma on the irrelevance of those writing in English.
The scholarly Shakespearean Professor Rupin Desai did a Hamlet under the
wistaria and poet Keki N. Daruwalla could have been verse.
The Retreat's advance, in publishing terms,
is a book of inspired short stories, the illustrations for the book ready
the next day at Bulbul Sharma's printmaking session which was all paint
and fury. Landour is Ruskin Bond territory, with pine-shadowed walks and
colonial bungalows; the highlight was Ruskin's cemetery tour. It has graves
dating back to the 19th century and Bond knows the tale of many who lie
there. With so many writers tripping among the bones of the dead, a ghost
writer or two would surely have stirred under their sepulchres.
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