Travel writing often falls back on familiar descriptions of small towns. Terms like sleepy, mofussil suggest a slower rhythm of life, but in the process, they also flatten the deeper pulse that once made these places whole.

These places are usually portrayed as existing outside time, defined more by what they lack than by what they offer. So, when the “country’s foremost chronicler of small-town life" turns his gaze to small towns, to their charm, their character, and their quiet magnetism and the changes they are encountering under the weight of rapid urbanisation and migration, it comes as a delightful departure from the clichéd narrative.

It awakens a longing, not merely to return to a place, but to return to a way of being. Ruskin Bond writes of towns where an aimless evening stroll was not an indulgence but a ritual; a pause at a familiar corner, watching the light soften and the day loosen its grip, was woven into the fabric of living.

In The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns: A Journey Through, Bond does not mourn loudly. Instead, he listens to footsteps that once echoed on familiar roads, to voices that seem to hover in memory, to silences that speak of what has gently slipped away. Bond writes with an awareness that these towns are losing not only population but also character, continuity, and a sense of ease.

To tell this story, Bond turns to people and their voices, guided by his simple but telling observation that “people give character to a town."

Alongside them, institutions such as cinema halls, railway stations, and bookshops emerge as quiet co-narrators, shaping the everyday life and shared memory of the small town.

The book opens with a simple, almost matter-of-fact assertion: small towns are vanishing. As Bond writes,........

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