notes from a small room by Ruskin Bond

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Location: your room, somewhere in India
Time: early morning
Shut your eyelids and place your palms over it.
What do you listen to?
Rumbling of the monkey mind?
Pressure cooker whistles.
Whirring fan.
Vociferous gargling of a neighbor.
The running tap.
The rustling of the newspaper.
Now, stand in your balcony.
You might hear a parrot screech or a sparrow chirp;
the wind blowing past your eyes; the cacophony of the street.
Perhaps, these are the notes from your room.
Now, go into the lanes and by lanes of your surroundings and record what you write.
These could be the notes from your room.
Ruskin Bond, the master storyteller, chose a familiar fabric of his surroundings and stitched 39 beautiful and colorful notes with them. 

The 171-page starts with “It’s the simple things in life that keeps us from going crazy.”

The things we oft ignore are magnified and you cannot help but observe the small things around you. Like the red ant that lands on your hand and you know its as scared as you and you gently nudge it into the trees.


Ruskin speaks of his father, their walks in Simla—the movies, the confectionaries, the stamp collection; he talks of the brook and the river; the cicadas and the germanium pots; the sounds he loves and his cat, Suzie and the cunning sparrow and the homely pigeons; the bhoot, the pisach and the folktales associated with it. What I love about this book is he personalizes it to an extent that you feel that he is seated on a rocking chair and you are seated beside him and listening to him. Isn’t Ruskin the most adorable writer? He is like the grandfather, you want to revisit. The thirty-nine evoke a different sense and you wish it would not end. I borrowed this book from the British Library and the faded brown pages marked with little notes makes it endearing. The seperators in the book are mini sketches of kettles, mynah, pigeon, typewriter, a leaf, a deciduous tree, clouds, and the simple things in life that keep us from going crazy.


Pick it up! 

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