Connections

One of my dearest pals visited Goa for a friend’s wedding. He got to Goa by train and it was quite a cramped journey spent huddled on the floor near the toilets. Not so pleasant, obviously. What was pleasant was his encounter with a fellow travelling companion. She was travelling with her parents and my friend spent a good part of the trip chatting with her. She got off earlier than he did and not surprisingly my pal found the rest of the journey boring. He’d written to us about this incident and I remarked that it felt right out of a R K Narayan novel.

What strikes the readers of R K Narayan or Ruskin Bond or O Henry as utterly charming is not the simple prose or the uncomplicated storyline or the realistic characters. To give a background of their writing, (feel free to pitch in, fans), their stories are simple to say the least. Most of the times, the characters are people you can relate to instantly. There are no elaborate plots, no scheming villains, no evil aunts/uncles. Most of Ruskin Bond’s stories are set in the hills of Northern India. He loved the hills, no doubt about it. Even more, he loved the simple people who inhabited these regions. His stories revolve around the harsh lives these people lead, the simple pleasures they have, the beautiful trees dotting the hillside, the myriad birds winging their way across the deodars and the not-so-rare panther streaking across the garden in the night. I have not done justice to this writer’s style but you can get a fair idea of his books. As for R K Narayan, I think most of his stories are set in small towns and villages in Southern India. That’s not strictly true because I have read travelogues penned by him too. In any case, the mainstay of his writing is similar to that of Ruskin Bond’s, only set in another part of small-town India.

But what captivates me and makes me a fan of these authors is the way they have brought to life the strong and invisible thread that binds each one of us. We are more than six billion people on this planet and each person has a world inside his/her own head. We communicate with numerous people outside of us because we have to. We talk to countless people daily, deal with them, interact on various levels. We have various tasks to accomplish and for this purpose, we communicate with these individuals. Therefore, every once in a while, when we step out of these almost-selfish worlds of ours and interact with a complete stranger only to realise that we have this strange, almost invisible bond with him/her, the effect is near-magical. We get talking to this person with no agenda on our minds and then as time passes, we realise that the connections we share are deeper and stronger than we can ever imagine. It’s like ‘There are no strangers in this world, only friends we are yet to meet’. We get a final realization of how we simply cannot do without each other, friends or not.