SENSE IN NONSENSE

In his latest book of poetry, Ruskin Bond is at his funniest

- ANJULY MATHAI

While the Covid pandemic was a time of frustration for the young, who wanted to go on with their lives, it was a time of waiting for the old, writes Ruskin Bond in his latest book of nonsense poetry, Rhymes for the Times. Would they survive or would they get the virus too? To make matters worse, Bond got a skin infection which kept him awake at night. The itching would start as soon as he went to bed. And so, to get through the night, he started writing limericks and nonsense verse.

“I have written serious verse in the past, but as I get older, life seems to get a bit funnier,” the master crafter, who turned 90 last May, told THE WEEK. “So I thought some nonsense would put me in a better mood. A lot of it was real nonsense and went into the waste paper basket. But some nonsense made sense, and Penguin kindly put it together in this book.”

The poems are by turns absurd, silly, wise, funny, and profound. The best truths, after all, are conveyed through humour. For example, here’s how Bond shows that beneath the surface, we are all the same:

Great men must burp,
And saints must sneeze,
And kings grow wobbly in the knees,
And so, when people laugh at you,
Remember—they’re just as funny in the loo.

Most of the poems are drawn from memory and experience. A poem on a man who laughed too much was inspired by a folk tale that was narrated to him many years ago by a woman who lived in a village near Agra. “She used to tell me funny stories about village life,” says Bond. “She is long gone, but I remembered her story about a man who laughed so much that his head fell off.”