'Words from My Window' is a uniquely miniscule literary offering by Ruskin Bond, India's own 'Resident Wordsworth in Prose'. The book is hardly a half-hour read and boasts of just one or two measured and well-crafted sentences every alternate page. The pages are nevertheless adorned by vivid water colour sketches of Dan Williams, the London based artist who had earlier illustrated Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer, a deeply moving book on the 2014 Syrian Refugee Crisis.
It so transpires that during the course of writing this book Ruskin Bond coaxed Dan Williams to spend hours at his window with his sketch pad and other accompaniments. The book came out as a result, a pure sensory-visual delight. Bond rightly admitted then: "This book is as much his as it is mine".
The author begins thus: “This journal is an ode to my window, or rather, to all the windows I have possessed throughout my life; for without a window I doubt if I would have been half the writer that I am today.” For all his distinguished writerly life the venerable Bond has sat at his desk next to the window, writing stories, poems and memoirs. His home in Landour - Bond's abode for the last thirty years - has windows opening to the elements, "to the night air, to the day breeze, to moonlight, to mist or sunshine, to birds and insects, to the rhythm of the seasons". Never a dull moment really, for something is always happening outside.
Reminiscing from his window, Ruskin Bond dwells on his school days, his passage to England on the island of Jersey at his aunt's house, his London days and discovery of the city by walking, his coming back to India and his writerly life and times in Dehra ever since. His walks, his books, his cinema, his songs, all helped the author to be content with his own company. "I'm not a powerful man, just a frail human full of faults and foibles; but sitting on that knoll, in the fragrance of the pine, and looking out over the receding hills and the valley beyond, I was filling with a sense of well-being, of belief in myself".
No wonder, a contended, minimalist and nature-loving Ruskin Bond has always liked Christina Rossetti's poems, especially the one that goes:
Hurt no living thing;
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing,
Nor cricket chirping cheerily,
Nor grasshopper so light of leap,
Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,
Nor harmless worms that creep.
One last point. For a tome of sparse wordage, it is too steeply priced at Rs 499.
The writer is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading.
