A Flight of Pigeons by Ruskin Bond

If a movie is made based on a book you have read, watching the movie is a must. But if you have seen a movie based on a novel you haven’t read, it’s unlikely that you would read the novel. We somehow tend to believe it’s always a novel to a movie and the reverse journey doesn’t excite us a much. But with The Flight of Pigeons by Ruskin Bond I did make that reverse journey.

I had watched Junoon (based on the novel The Flight of Pigeons) many years ago and liked it, the story of a passionate one-sided love of a Pathan for an English girl in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. A few years ago I chanced upon the book the movie was based on. A few months ago, after wanting to read it for many years since I saw it the first time, I finally read it.

 In a foreword Ruskin Bond informs that as a kid he had heard the story from his father, who, in turn, had heard it from Bond’s grandfather, a soldier those days, several times. The incident which took place in a small town in UP (Sharanpur) during the Mutiny had captivated a young Bond.

Many years later, when Bond decided to write a novella based on the incident,  he visited Sharanpur and found many of its parts, especially those the British families occupied in the days of the Mutiny, unchanged from how his father had described them.  

The action starts with a church where a mass is underway being attacked by rebels inspired by the hate wave that’s blowing across swathes of the country against the British. Among others, the narrator’s (a British teenage girl) father is killed. 

Following the death the family takes shelter in a Hindu merchant’s house who has braved the consequences of sympathizing with a British family amidst the anti-British frenzy which has gripped the town. 

In the meantime, a Pathan, a married man with a reputation for his dare devilry and cruelty, who is wreaking havoc in and outside the town by killing and looting the British and wealthy Hindus and setting their establishments ablaze, has taken a shine to the British girl and coaxes the Lala to let the family go with him and stay in his haveli.

After bringing them to haveli the Pathan does what was not expected of him. Instead of forcibly marrying the British girl or dishonoring her, he asks her mother for her daughter’s hand and the mother says the Pathan could marry her daughter if the rebel side won the war. Finally, the British win the war.

After some time the British reenter the town of Sharanpur to the relief of its British inhabitants and those who had persecuted the British families following the outbreak of the Mutiny and the reverses the British had suffered, flee the town to escape British retribution. 

However, after knowing that the lover Pathan has fled the town and gone beyond any possibility of return or been seen again, the British girl, in a silent acknowledgement of her softness for the handsome and chivalrous man, wishes him a safe passage.

By reading the outline of Flight you would expect it to be a romantic thriller, but it is not. After the initial burst of action it settles into a slow pace and shows reveals different layers of the story. 

The reaction of the people to what the Pathan wants to do, the transformation of the Pathan from a reckless troublemaker to a lovesick man patiently awaiting the matrimonial permission of his muse’s mother, the grit of the girl’s mother, who, despite the fact that she and her family are at the mercy of the testy Pathan, manages to keep her wit and composure in place.

And then you have the magic touch of Ruskin Bond to savour.  

Hip Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems - by Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond recently visited Bangalore to launch his new book of poems, Hip Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems. I had decided to visit the venue but couldn’t. However, later I visited the bookstore Bond had launched the book at and bought the book. Some of the poems the book carries were written by Bond in the past and some are new and have been written particularly for the book. The poems are for children but I liked them anyway. Some of them tell short autobiographical stories and some just are stray thoughts on various things related to nature.


Not many people read poetry because they think poetry is about esoteric profundity. That’s partly true – poetry is about profundity dealt with brevity and wit. And I like such poems, but what I particularly look for in poems is simple truth and observations told with easy language and occasional peppering of wit; it should read natural and not forced. It leaves you feeling light and easy just how peppermint leaves you feeling after you have finished sucking it.

What the poems have in common with Bond’s other writings is that the poems are about the ordinary and the hum drum. Bond has made a career out of writing about ordinary things, people, places. Even a history book I had read by Bond was not about kings and leaders but ordinary people who lived their lives in times that were historically significant.

A few lines of a poem:

The simplest things in life are best

A patch of green,

A small bird’s nest,

A drink of water, fresh and cold,

The taste of bread,

A song of old,

These are the things that matter most.

Strange Men Strange Places by Ruskin Bond

There are two types of histories, one is about the life of nations and people who decide their course and the other is about ordinary people who live their lives under the cross currents of big events (social, political and economic) that are never of their own making but often shape their lives and circumstances.

I am reading a book by Ruskin Bond which visits the lives of people who live in the backwaters of history, and even though some of their lives and achievements may be extraordinary, they never attract the interest of historians and are seldom remembered beyond the span of their time and space. 

To exhume these characters out of obscurity, Bond visits the early years of British rule in India when the British were yet to establish themselves as a national power and parts of India were still ruled by small-time rajas and chieftains who had their own armies and used to employ Europeans in them, much in demand for their ability to coalesce ragtag armies into disciplined fighting units. Apart from soldiers, the book also documents the lives of European marchants, mercenaries, bootleggers, etc.

Many of these Europeans returned home wealthy men and some of them met with their end in India.

It was a time when lot of social intermingling between the ruling English and natives existed; which stopped following the 1857 Sipoy Mutiny that shocked the British and forced them into a social stratosphere, bringing up a separation from Indians that would last until the end of the Raj. There are stories that give the glimpses of pre-1857 society and social trends.

One of the stories tells the tale of the hukkah, a smoking pipe much in use during those days by English men and women who had taken to Indian ways. But with the passage of time as division rose between the English and Indians, the hukkah fell out of favour with the British.

Bond has had to undertake extensive research to write the book as the material on the men he has written about would have been hard to come by. These men lived in different places in India and served different masters, but some of them knew each other and you will find the recurrence of one character in the life/story of another.

Writers are generally a recluse lot, but modern-day writers are hardly so (at least if you go by the visibility they enjoy thanks to TV shows and literary festivals). However, Bond continues to be a throwback to the idea of the writer as a recluse.

I have never heard him make any political statement or seen him involved in a public spat. He continues to stay in Mussoorie, which is a recurrent theme in his writing, and deals with the ordinary. Therefore Strange Men Strange Places may be an oddity as a book of history, but it sits well with Bond’s general body of work, which is neither about nations nor national heroes or villains, but about ordinary people, places and events.