India Today Books [Moving Memoir]

SCENES FROM A WRITER'S LIFE: A MEMOIR
By RUSKIN BOND
PENGUIN
PAGES: 178/PRICE: Rs 300

Pain and a sense of deprived childhood wash through this autobiography of one of India's foremost Indo-Anglian writers. It is also the story of a lonely Anglo-Indian's perseverance to be a writer.

Bond has been around for about four decades -- a sort of guardian angel of Indian fiction -- writing novels, short stories, children's stories and editing anthologies, awakening our minds to old-world charms and snow-specked hills. That's why it is difficult to imagine that his childhood was full of untold suffering; an absentee father caught in the throes of the War and a mother who married a shikar-loving Punjabi. Bond has a lot to be bitter about. But it is with characteristic restraint, his prose sedate but incredibly sensitive, that he leads us through his early life.

After his parents' divorce, his mother abandoned him to the care of his father while his handicapped sister was sent to his granny in Calcutta. His father loved him dearly and sold his collection of stamps to make a decent living. The War gave him no peace of mind (moving from one place to another) and body (frequent attacks of malaria to which he finally succumbed). One of the most poignant passages is a letter which his father wrote to Bond from Calcutta before his death: "Do you need any new warm clothes? ... Do you catch butterflies on sunny days on the school cricket ground?"

Equally poignant is the description of Bond getting off at the Dehradun station, miserable after his father's death, hoping to meet his mother. Of course, she wasn't there: "No one who looked even remotely familiar came up to where I sat on my tin trunk beside my bedding roll, attache case and hockey stick. Even the platform dogs have slunk away ..."

But Bond survived. Like platform dogs, the demons which haunted him have slunk away, and he bloomed.

AUTHORSPEAK: Richard Crasta

A Small-town Voice
The US-based writer's satire deflates western notions

By Bindu Menon

He was that lower-middle class boy from Mangalore who joined the ias so that he could "go upstairs and be with the big boys". But after a few years in the bureaucracy, Richard Crasta felt his writing voice had totally deserted him and a certain "rigidity of the backbone" had taken over. So he gave up babudom and and set off to the US, ostensibly to "educate himself" ("I'm afraid I'm still uneducated," he laughs). After a degree in creative writing from Columbia University, he worked in a literary agency, dabbled in teaching, freelanced for a living and now calls himself "an underground man". "I write what I feel," he says, and adds, laughing, "I may not agree with everything I write."

But Crasta does believe in his first novel, The Revised Kamasutra, published in 1993, which earned him enough accolades for a debut novelist. A rambunctious and hilarious book, it was, he says, a sociological picture of Mangalore, but feels it hasn't reached a hundredth of its potential readers. He plans to soon bring out a revised and more uninhibited version of the novel with, of course, a different title in India. His second book, Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex, published recently by HarperCollins, is a collection of satirical essays which tackle issues as diverse as feminism, American politics, sex in Kama-land, beauty contests and writing in Indian English in his typical biting, cynical style combined with a zany sense of humour.

Crasta has two more books lined up for publication: Impressing the Whites, a satire on how entire non-white civilisations are diluting themselves by kowtowing to the West, and Killing of an Author, a literary autobiography of sorts. These books, termed the Freedom Series, are his contribution to the golden jubilee of the nation's Independence. "I have strongly resisted being Americanised," he says. Which perhaps explains why he still lives on the fringes of the literary community in the US. After 18 years in America, he finds a yawning cultural gap between Indian metros that are so attuned to western ideas and small-town India where such ideas haven't filtered yet. And he feels he is the "instrument of the voice of this middle class, small-town India". "The voice possesses me," he says. "The world of my childhood is still my fund of inspiration." Inspiring words from a non-resident writer who is still rooted in his homeland.

December 29, 1997