The second part of Ruskin Bond's Adventures of Rusty is entitled "Running Away." Rusty and his friend Daljit decide that life in their school in the hills has become unbearable and so they head for Jamnagar where Rusty's uncle's ship is docking for a few weeks, a brief break in it's perpetual perambulation around the world. Daljit is the son of a rich East African Indian and feels school is unnecessary while Rusty wants to see the world, wants to make his way to the glamourous destinations his uncle mentions in his letters.

Those destinations become an incantation that appears in the book several times: Yokohama, Valparaiso, San Diego, London. And it was this incantation that remained in my memory decades after I had lost my original hardback of this book.

Reading it again last week, I was struck by how lively and exciting the descriptions of the landscape Rusty seeks to escape are. His partner and he travel through Old Delhi, share the back of a truck with a buffalo on the way to Jaipur, run into dacoits and have their clothes stolen among other things. And these adventures, these first rate adventures, are what Rusty wants to leave behind as he travels the world.

A very early version of Above Average referred to Rusty's magical list of faraway places. But that got edited away and I forgot about it in the course of the writing. Then, much later, writing the scene where Arindam goes to check his IIT result, I wrote the following:

But there was a part of me that knew even then that for people like me safe harbours were an illusion; you could stay but you would inevitably become the only one left behind, lonely and dissatisfied.

(Above Average, pp 176)