Ruskin Bond is a one-man publishing industry in a country where it is notoriously difficult to find a loyal mass readership. He has lived by the written word and the written word alone. When I first meet Bond in May, his 85th birthday is around the corner; he’s besieged with requests for interviews. Sitting in his cosy cottage apartment on a quiet hillside, he announces with good-natured irritability: I think I’ve had enough. Next year, I’m going underground.’
Bond is nobody’s fool. Speaking of his preference for rum, he says: One knows what one is drinking: molasses. He draws a link between an infrastructural development in Uttarakhand and his book sales: The new two-hour air-link between Dehradun and Mumbai means a lot more readers are flying down. Their primary objective is to get photographed with me and share it on Facebook. In the process, Cambridge Book Depot in Mussoorie also sells some copies of my books.
I hand Bond a copy of The Young Vagrants, published by India Book House in 1981. His eyes light up: It’s a first edition! I’ll certify it for you. The edition contains pen and ink drawings by Imtiaz Dharker who, as we speak, has been offered the poet laureateship in the UK and is in the process of turning it downto concentrate on my poetry’.
Bond’s not sure if he has all his editions under one roof. He has lost count of his printed work. I think I have about 180 to 200 books in print at the moment. Someone needs to compile a Bond bibliography, soon.
His latest memoir, The Beauty of All My Days, will appear in yet another Penguin avatar, the black and white photos, lovingly captioned by Bond, being replaced with illustrations by Dan Williams, who also illustrated Khalid Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.
Towards the end of the book, Bond recalls attending a talk given by Nehru: Nehru took his own writing seriously but without pretension. It could well describe Bond’s own approach to writing.
He writes about Anglo-Indians, the left-behinds lingering on in newly Independent India, often with tragic consequences: They remind me how close I came to being one of them. I was lucky in that I had a small talent with words.
Bond found his material early: By the time I left London, I knew the city…but did not know any Londoners. Sailing to England for the first time at the age of 17, standing on the lower deck of his steamer, he has an epiphany: There was no one to see me off except the land itself.
The land itselfwhat did it care for a solitary boy leaving for another shore? But that boy cared about the lovely land and all that lived and grew upon it. I knew I would return one day.
He returns two years later, as soon as Diana Athill at Andre Deutsch offers him an advance for his first novel, using the money to buy a passage home. The Doon Valley and Landour provide him with the landscape, the natural world (flying bluebottles, the praying mantis, a crow with a weakness for Golden Eagle beer) and the ordinary people that would become his literary staple: Dukhi spent most of his life growing sweet peas and petunias for an old lady. That’s the kind of life I try and celebrate.
He lived modestly, living off his articles and stories, which he bombarded magazine editors with. The cheques trickled in. Fortunately, back then, there were still openings for the kinds of things I wrote. Bond says: I wrote five stories earlier this year, though now the book is the receptacle for my new work. Those magazinesBlackwood’s, The Illustrated Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, the Sunday Standard Weeklydon’t exist.
Bond did not start out as a children’s writer, but it’s what he owes his success too. Fifty per cent of what I write is for children and 50 per cent for adults, he says. The fact that he is one of India’s greatest living writers is not lost on his contemporaries. Naipaul was full of high praise for Bond: He’s writing about tremendous solitude.
He himself doesn’t say it. He leaves it all to you to pick up. From this great subcontinent full of people, to write a book about solitude is quite an achievement. I have read nothing like that from India. Irwin Allan Sealy called The Room on the Roof one of the greatest novels produced in this country.
Bond is that rare beast, the popular literary writer. Readers often turn up at his Ivy Cottage unannounced. He is not averse to interacting with people, though he’d prefer it if they forewarned him instead of just landing up. Fond parents have badgered him into signing all kinds of books for their children, from Enid Blytons to an autobiography of Ian Botham. He has obliged them all.
read the full story about Many happy returns
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