![]() The Love-Hate of SolitudeNivedita Sen RUNGLI-RUNGLIOT [THUS FAR AND NO FURTHER] By Rumer Godden . Illustrations by Ashis Panday Speaking Tiger Publications, New Delhi (First published by Peter Davies, London, 1944), 2015, pp. 162, Rs. 299.00 VOLUME XL NUMBER 5 May 2016 In Chinglam, most of what I plan comes true
and that has seldom happened to me in any
other place. The days were stolen before they
had begun; I think I never saw a day. When I
was a child I remember days that stretched into
infinity with the certainty of other infinite days;
certain, unhurried and brimmingly full.
For the reader, the beauty of life in a
solitary mountainous retreat in the
North East is evoked in this very image
of time hanging so heavy; the author’s
day-to-day journal describes small and unrelated
acts of quotidian life, human exchanges,
and communion with nature, children
and animals minutely one after the other
as she reminisces about her life as a recluse
for a year. The bottom line that holds these
together is that of her not unequivocal bliss
of solitude which is often not just magical
and enigmatic but tedious, irksome and overwhelming
in its all-pervasiveness. The incessant
monsoons are not just depressing but
contribute to the Teesta being a beautiful
but menacingly cruel river that must take at
least a life a year. The extreme isolation invokes
a sort of gentle but enchanting melancholy.
For the writer, the timeless beauty of
the hills that she describes so lyrically is not
an abstraction but a solace.
In the foreword, Ruskin Bond recalls
being drawn to the book because of his identification
with a home in the hills. He introduces
the English writer of sixty books who
spent a lot of time in India, whose novel The
River was made into a film by Jean Renoir
and who yet seems to have gone out of the
list of the best authors of the twentieth century.
He informs the reader that she retired
to work and write in a tea estate near
Darjeeling after she was ‘deserted by a fickle
husband and forced to give ballroomdancing
lessons in wartime Calcutta.’ We do
not get any sneak peek into her private life
otherwise, apart from her children. The
reader is not even told who the boy Henry is
who comes to live with them for a while and
why.
In her diary, Rumer Godden wants to
distil ‘the spirit or essential oils of Chinglam’,
and thus begins with the legend of how the
place (Rungli Rungliot—‘thus far and no urther’ in Pahadia) got its name. Chinglam
is seven miles below Rungli ... Table of Contents >> |