Reading biographies can be an unsettling feeling. Since school, I have read several biographies – first being Gandhi’s My Experiments With Truth. It has become one of my favourite genre of reading for its deliverance and reflexivity that it comes along with. However, it has taken several years to understand the nature of discomfort, or that unsettling feeling which dawn upon after having read the book. Last evening, as I completed Ruskin Bond’s autobiography Lone Fox Dancing, the discomfort revealed itself. I realized that it is about the sense of time – a fear rather. A life of several decades gets compressed into a few hundred pages which can be read in a matter of hours. This has made me feel uneasy, as though time itself is a blink and biographies demonstrate it to the reader, right there, in his room! Ruskin Bond’s eighty-three years of life glimpsed through in a few hours alters the sense of ‘life’. The pages turns into a ticker tape and one can examine through decades worth of experiences in a fast-forward manner. It drives home the idea of brevity of life, which is where I feel my discomfort lies – that if one isn’t conscious of passing time, it ends all too soon. And consequently, my life until now feels like a blip! Missed in that blink, when I did.
Three years back when I read biographies it was about the events and particulars. I remember writing this after reading Salim Ali’s. It was a fascination for experiences of a person I admired. I sense a slightly different concern and insight developing in my reading of biographies in later years. Oliver Sacks’ autobiography On the Move was another fascinating life story I read this year. I am glad that he could write this before his death. And equally glad that Ruskin Bond could share his endearing and admirable life story before it got too late.
Recollecting the time he met Billy, which was shortly after his seventy-fifth birthday in 2008, Sacks writes –
It has sometimes seemed to me that I have lived at a certain distance from life. This changed when Billy and I fell in love. As a twenty-year-old, I had fallen in love with Richard Selig; as a twenty-seven-year-old, tantalizingly, with Mel; as a thirty-two-year-old, ambiguously, with Karl; and now (for God’s sake!) I was in my seventy-seventh year.
Over half a century of life distilled in one paragraph. This is a mild shock for someone who hasn’t yet found his own sense of time or view about it.
In his book, Bond too, folds up time – a good fifty years, into a few short sentences which are lovely to read, but tends to leave the reader with ‘Is that all what it is about?’ kind of feeling –
Fifty years in the hills has made a great change for all those comings and goings during my boyhood and youth. It’s good to be in one place for a certain length of time, in order to savour the passing seasons, the changes in the foliage of the hillside, the comings and goings of people, and above all, to watch children grow up.
And here are the most pensive lines from Bond –
As for my writing life, it is a running stream, for there is no limit to the field of my remembrance. Even as this book comes to an end, I am conscious of not having written about important people, important events; but it is a personal history, and it is the ‘unimportant’ people who have made my life worthwhile, as an individual and as a writer.
And both as individual and writer, I have known my limitations, and I think I have done my best with the talents I possess. Sometimes it is good to fail; to lose what you most desire; to come second. And the future is too unpredictable for anxiety.
This is the evening of a long and fairly fulfilling life.
Except this feeling about time, I find biographies to be an important medium of sharing and understanding lives, experiences, possibilities and alternatives that exist in the phenomenal diversity of people around us. Only that I shouldn’t be keeping down every biography feeling that life, after all, is so short.
Contested Realities 