Ruskin Bond recalls the first time he saw the Tricolour being hoisted

Many years ago, when I first read a collection of his short stories, I had imagined him as an incredibly old man sitting in a room packed to the rafters with books, churning out tales by the dozen each day. When I meet Ruskin Bond, over Zoom, the vision doesn’t seem very far from the truth. As the video comes on, I find myself staring into a yellow-painted space, perhaps underneath a staircase or very close to a sloping roof, given the slanted wooden beams. He’s wearing a lemon-yellow sweatshirt and the brightest of smiles. Behind him, the wall is packed with books and awards. Is he incredibly old though? I am not sure. He is 88 and remembers, in vivid detail, the rainy morning of August 15, 1947. He was 13 then.

“I was in boarding school, in Shimla. Our school was a good 45-minute walk from where all the meetings were held — the upper mall,” he recalls. “The whole school had to march into town for a special gathering; the governor was going to give a speech. Shimla was still the summer capital of India. It was raining, of course, as it often does around August 15 there.” So, they all got their gumboots and mackintoshes on, and plodded through the mud and water. “We were all very hungry by the time we reached. There was a flag ceremony and speeches, and we saw the new Indian flag for the first time. Then finally, someone came along with boxes of jalebis and samosas.” His eyes glisten at the mention of samosas.

“People tell me I put a lot of food into my stories and articles. But when I write for children, it’s good to write about food,” he says. “When I am asked what’s similar between children today and children from my era, my answer is: what they like to eat!”

  

I remember, in one of my favourite collections of Bond’s short stories, The Road to the Bazaar, pakodas often serve as crucial plot points for bringing together the young protagonists or bookending their adventures. Surely, it was inspired by his favourite snacks from the hills? “Landour is a little too… I don’t know… exclusive. We have bakeries and coffee shops — western confectioneries — but no chaat shop. For that, you have to visit the bazaar.”

It’s a few minutes past five in the evening, and Bond has just had his cup of coffee from the Landour Bakehouse, with a slice of their famous rose and almond cake. “I am not that big a fan of cakes now,” he tells me. “I would rather have aloo tikkis, gol-gappas and chaat. And I used to get those a lot when I was in Dehradun (which is some 35 km from his home in Landour). But it’s my granddaughter’s birthday today, and so I went for the cake!”

Bond lives with his adopted family in Landour. Born to English parents in pre-Independence India, he spent most of his life in Shimla, Dehradun and Mussoorie. After a brief stint in London, where he published his first novel, he used the book's advance payment to buy a return ticket home to Dehradun.

Dehradun was also where Bond learnt about a pivotal event in India’s history. “I was back home from Shimla and had gone to watch a film — Blossoms in the Dust (1941) — when after 10 minutes, the manager of the cinema hall stopped the screening and announced that Mahatma Gandhi had been shot. I still haven’t watched the complete film.”

As I sip through my chai, watching these word-pictures flash by my small virtual window, I marvel at how effortlessly the master weaves through tales and anecdotes. It’s like witnessing one of his short stories unfold in front of your very eyes. People like me, who’ve experienced two or three world-altering events — the 9/11 attacks, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the birth of the smartphone — often believe we have seen eons pass in mere decades. What about a person who has not only watched history unfold, but has also scripted his own parallel histories through his books?

  

“There were lots of dams and five-year plans, of course. But one also saw entire cities coming up — Chandigarh, for instance,” he says. “And Delhi, how it has transformed! In the ’60s, I used to walk from Connaught place to Rajouri Garden — a three-hour walk — eating boiled eggs along the way.” Who’d dare do so now amidst the zipping traffic? “It’s nice to see history happen in this visual manner,” he says, “not people fighting but settlements being built from scratch.”

I have always thought Bond’s tales painted a different history of India, staying, mostly, away from the big events and yet not quite untouched. In his stories one meets a young India that has a deep connection with nature, overlooking small street-size communities, through small old windows woven with bougainvillea vines. That India, like all other Indias, has seen sea changes. “Forget about the politics and religious conflicts, I always see the history of India as the evolution of the different class strata — upper, middle, and the working classes,” he says.

The octogenarian author sounds wistful when he speaks of young Indians moving away and settling abroad. As he tells me about his fascination with the growth of India’s middle-class, and its foreign aspirations, I try to imagine Ranji, Rusty, Koki or any of his several characters leaving Dehra or Deoli and flying away to bigger cities. Would we have had very different versions of them if Bond had started writing today?

“So, what if I was 17 today, eh? Well, I would still like to engage with the natural world, and talk about young people, their relationships, their trysts,” he says. “The Room on the Roof was a book by an adolescent about adolescence. When the novel was written, I had nothing else to write about.” A great diarist who likes to maintain detailed journals, he says, “Since my tales all emerge from my observations in the journals, I think I would have written about the present world in a similar way.”

Bond, who has often called himself a “visual writer”, is reticent however about his experience with the torrent of new visuals — web series, GIFs, and memes. He keeps up with the news, he says. “And YouTube! I was surprised to find that I was on it too,” he laughs.

The author is also enthralled by the ready availability of books on the internet: “Even authors and volumes I thought had long gone out of print can be found on the internet! That’s fascinating.” Given his long career, there must be authors he interacted with whose works he found endearing, I ask. He mentions Mulk Raj Anand: “Just out of school, I had read Untouchable and Coolie. In the late 1990s, when he was in his 90s and I in my 60s, he was in Mussoorie to give a lecture at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy. And strangely enough, he turned up at my doorstep. Somebody had brought him over.” They had a long chat about books. “I knew his works quite well and he had read one of mine. We managed to remain in touch for some time after that. He would send me the odd postcard, signed ‘Uncle Mulk’.”

So, is there a new favourite? He promptly fetches from his shelves a copy of A Silent Place by Vinod Kumar Shukla, a renowned writer of Hindi literature whose works border on magic realism. “It’s a good translation, and I have recently started reading it. I do get sent a few volumes, especially by self-published authors and those can vary in quality. We need more examples of great translations, though.”

It’s almost past six in the evening, and the “lone fox” seems a little out of breath from our long conversation. But the selfish fan that I am, I cling on for one last question. Like numerous fans of his, I hope for still more surprises from the wizard’s hat. Is there a secret collection of a different kind of writing he hasn’t shared yet but would want to in the future? His next book, Rhymes for the Times, will be released in December by Penguin. Will we find poems of a different flavour? What about, given his love for food, a few discovered recipes?

He laughs out loud. “I don’t have recipes because I can’t cook! Perhaps ‘50 different ways of boiling an egg’ or ‘101 Failed Omelettes’.” And then he adds, “Almost everything I have written in my journal has already entered my short stories, essays, poems, or memoirs. If there’s something I didn’t want to be seen in print, I wouldn’t put it down anyway. So far, there’s nothing to be discovered later.”