{"id":43874,"date":"2012-09-22T20:01:05","date_gmt":"2012-09-22T20:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/test.tehelka.com\/?p=43874"},"modified":"2012-09-22T20:01:05","modified_gmt":"2012-09-22T20:01:05","slug":"a-wry-read-on-royalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/a-wry-read-on-royalty\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wry Read on Royalty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ruskin Bond<\/strong>\u2019s newest book is a detached and amused look at a decadent queen and an age long gone, says\u00a0Aradhna Wal<\/strong><\/em>
\n

\"Holding<\/a>
Holding Court<\/strong> Ruskin Bond<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nAS YOU<\/strong>\u00a0get older you have more stories to tell,\u201d is how Ruskin Bond explains publishing a book every year. The 78-year-old author\u2019s latest book,\u00a0Maharani<\/em>, falls into a familiar groove of chronicling a bygone era. The novella is a charming look at a motley bunch of characters and life in the hills when they were a destination for the elite.
\nRuskin, the eponymous narrator, and Neena meet at a school \u2018social\u2019. Married at 16 to the older Maharajah of Mastipur, whose signature eccentricity is raising white mice, Her Highness is a grand old dame with a hefty sense of old school entitlement. The narrator and HH, as he fondly calls her, reconnect on a Pondicherry beach, and party at her home in Mussoorie, which overflows with liquor supplied by her many lovers, from Bolivian diplomats and Brigadiers, to a hotel pianist.
\n\u201cI am a romantic,\u201d Bond admits. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be here if I wasn\u2019t.\u201d \u201cHere\u201d is the slopes of Mussoorie, which he describes sparely, yet evoking lush images of light and shadow, of sunsets and solitary walks that end in chance encounters with the book\u2019s quirky cast. Pablo, the beautiful, beloved young son of the seduced diplomat sticks pins into voodoo dolls, hoping to kill off people he intensely dislikes. His sister, Anna, serenely sketches the ghosts she sees in windows. This infusion of whimsy and the supernatural is as integral to Bond\u2019s writing as it is to the hills. Bond collects eccentrics. \u201cI\u2019ve always gotten along with difficult people. Perhaps growing up in a home with relatives always in strange troubles has something to do with it. Maybe I\u2019m a good listener to these people. Maybe they\u2019re the ones with the best stories,\u201d he says. His romanticism hasn\u2019t divorced him from reality. \u201cThe more you are around adults, the sooner you lose your innocence. Perhaps, there are some people in whom it is inbred and stays for life,\u201d muses the author and finds echo in his writing. \u201cThis book is about decay,\u201d he says. That becomes nauseatingly obvious in the two-foot-long field rats and the innumerable pet dogs that go astray. They have a grim part to play in the plot. \u201cAnimals belong to the wild, it is a little unnatural to keep them as pets. Nature will intrude in some way,\u201d says Bond.
\n
\"Penguin<\/a>
Maharani
Ruskin Bond
Penguin
192pp; Rs 350<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nThis isn\u2019t the sepia-tinted world of his earlier work. \u201cI think I\u2019ve grown more cynical, and my writing and humour have a sharper edge to them.\u201d Ruskin, the character, professes neither a great friendship with HH nor a strong condemnation of her merry destruction of others\u2019 happiness. Theirs is a happy companionship. HH, though hard to like, is riveting, with her salacious stories, like the one about Jim Corbett\u2019s indifference towards women. Who she really is, Bond is reluctant to divulge. He laughs off the question, saying she is an amalgam of many people he has known. \u201cIt is important to preserve these memories, to show readers that such people did exist. It\u2019s a personal aim. As I write them down, fiction takes over.\u201d
\nHis books exist in those blurry boundaries and he finds writing in first person much easier. \u201cOnce I wrote about myself as a boy escaping Japanese occupation in Jakarta. And people thought it was true,\u201d he laughs. Dickens, with his own eventful childhood, is Bond\u2019s literary hero. On whether\u00a0Maharani<\/em>\u00a0is reality or fiction, he quotes that other wonderful charlatan, Mark Twain, \u201cInteresting if true. And if not true, still interesting.\u201d
\nAradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.<\/em>
\naradhna@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ruskin Bond\u2019s newest book is a detached and amused look at a decadent queen and an age long gone, says Aradhna Wal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":43878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[7051,20,7056,7435,7436,7437],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43874"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}