Skip to main content

Book Review: On Fairy Hill by Ruskin Bond

On Fairy Hill by Ruskin Bond is a short story, quite similar to Gulliver’s Lilliput. The story is about a mysterious hill top named Fairy Hill or Pari Tibba in Mussoorie. Rumours have that on this hill resides little people like fairies.


The narrator of the story is a struggling writer who lives in a small cottage at the edge of an oak forest. At night, he often watches out for green twinkling lights. He is inquisitive to know about those lights. There is no motorable road to reach Fairy Hill, thus the lights there cannot be by humans, like lanterns or lamps on bullock carts. One summer day, he scrambles up the hill. By the time, he reaches there he is dead tired. Removing his clothes, he sleeps under the trees.

After an hour or so, when he wakes up, he finds a strange sensation in his limbs. He is nonplussed to see a very small woman or girl, hardly two inches tall, seated on his chest. She has a buttercup in her hands with that she is tingling his flesh. Soon many Lilliput type people are upon him – massaging and relaxing his body. He loses himself in a strange feeling, mix of sleep and drowsiness.

When he wakes up next, he finds dark clouds gathering overhead. The little people are gone. But the fragrance of honeysuckle still lingers in the air. With the little people, gone are his clothes too. He doesn’t find the clothes anywhere. He searches for the people as well, but to no avail. Probably, they are gone to their world or gone under the rocks and earth.

Soon, it starts raining and takes hiding under a rock. In the dark, he goes back to his cottage without clothes. In the morning he wakes up feverish. He remains shrouded in fever for a week.

At night, from the window, he looks out for those lights on Fairy Hill, but he finds none. However, one morning he finds the same little folk coming to his window and they are coming through a rainbow, it works as a bridge for them. He is glad to see them back and longs to go back with them and wants to feel the same, like that summer day.

In the story the narrator admits that his life as a writer isn’t going great. His wife leaves him for better salary and life in Bombay. For human beings settled and routine things become boring, thus following his encounter with those little people, he longs for a miraculous change in his life. The moral of the story is that no one likes boring, straight life. Getting acquainted with fairies is indeed a dreamy proposition.

Enjoyed reading this story! Here is your chance to read 30 best stories by Ruskin Bond - https://goo.gl/uBeMY6

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Poem Summary: Where The Mind Is Without Fear by Rabindranath Tagore

Poem by Rabindranath Tagore: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Short Summary: This poem is written by Rabindranath Tagore during pre-independence days, when India was a colony of the British. The underlying theme of the poem is absolute freedom; the poet wants the citizens of his country to be living in a free state. According to the poem, we see that the poet is expressing his views there should be a country, like where people live without any sort of fear and with pure dignity…they should

Book Review: The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond

Among all Ruskin Bond books, The Blue Umbrella has, so far, gathered immense applaud from readers and critics alike.  This is a short novel, but the kind of moral lessons it teaches to us are simply overwhelming. This is a story of Binya, a poor little girl living with her mother and an elder brother, Bijju, in a small hilly village of Garhwal. One day while herding her two cows back home, she stumbles upon some city people enjoying the picnic in the valley. She is enthralled to see them well-groomed and rich. She craves to be one like them and among many other things of their, a blue frilly umbrella catches her attention. She begins craving for it. On the other hand, the city people get attracted by her innocent beauty and the pendant in her neck. The pendant consists of leopard’s claw – which is considered a mascot widely in the hills. Binya trades her pendant off with the blue umbrella. The blue umbrella is so much beautiful that soon it becomes a topic of conversation fo

Poem Summary: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias is a short poem of fourteen lines written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The concurrent theme of the poem is that nothing remains intact and same forever in this world. Even the brightest of metal, one day decays with passage of time. The throne name of Egyptian King Ramesses is Ozymandias. It was his dearest desire to preserve himself forever by building a huge statue that he thought would never tumble down. Stanza 1: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; Summary: The poet narrates the poem through the eyes of a traveler who seems to have come back from a remote and far-away land, referring to Egypt. The traveler r