Ruskin Bond, our very own Wordsworth in prose, has inspired young minds and moved hearts with his writings for over five decades
Once the mountains are in your blood, there is no escape.” Words ring true, even today, for the gentle muse from the mountains, author Ruskin Bond. Ruskin Bond is one of those Indians of British descent who, given a choice, chose to live in India. “But for the colour of his skin, he is hardly an ex-colonial pining away for the days of the Raj,” speaks author Ganesh Saili about his friend of over five decades.
Talking about the past comes easy. For here’s an author who has penned his life in most of his work, steeped in nostalgia.
“I was the eldest child of Edith and Aubrey Bond, born on May 19, 1934 in the Military Hospital, Kasauli, in the neighbouring hillstate of Himachal Pradesh.” He adds how he was baptised in the Anglican Church and christened Owen Ruskin Bond by his father, after the celebrated English author John Ruskin who happened to be his father’s favourite author.
The first page
The author spent his formative years in Jamnagar, where his father tutored the children of the royal family. Ellen, his younger sister, was born in 1936, but after an unfortunate bout of polio, was handicapped for life. Soon after the birth of Ellen, his parents divorced and went their separate ways. Ruskin was to live with his father, while the mother and daughter moved to Dehradun.
Soon thereafter, Aubrey Bond left Jamnagar to work for the Intelligence Branch of the Royal Air Force, in Delhi. Even today, Bond remembers the days he was home-schooled by his father in Delhi calling it, “a glorious year”.
In 1943, Bond’s father decided the boy would do best with a formal education, and admitted him to the Bishop Cotton School, Shimla, then known as Eton of the East. The author remembers wandering through The Mall road in Shimla, on a hand-drawn rickshaw through the monsoon mist while his father entertained him with, “stories of phantom-rickshaws and enchanted forests”.
The storyline
But all this was short lived. A year later, in 1944, Bond lost his father to a terrible bout of malaria. When the news of his death arrived, Ruskin was in school, aged 10. As if it happened yesterday, he reminiscences in his writing, “as there was no evidence of my father’s death, it was, for me, not a death but a vanishing. Even today, I subconsciously expect him to turn up and deliver me from bad situations.”
Perhaps the loneliest period of Bond’s life began when he finished school. Young Bond, a rebel somewhat, didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of staying with his mother and stepfather in Dehradun after his doting grandmother passed away. In the autumn of 1951, he decided to move to the foreign shores of Jersey where his aunt Emily lived with her family. She had agreed to give Bond a roof “until he found his own bearings”.
Two years later, he moved to London from Jersey, taking up odd jobs to eke out a living, while his heart pined for India and its familiar taste and smells. In the year 1954-1955 he met Diana Athill, the publisher from Andre Deutsch, who took keen interest in Bond’s attempt at his maiden novel, The Room on the Roof. The book was published in 1955 and won him the coveted the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize the following year. With the advance that was paid to him by Andre Deutsch and some money he had saved, Bond bought his ticket back to India aboard the Polish ship, S S Batory and set sail for home — India.
The plot thickens
Back home, in familiar territory, Bond set up base in Dehradun. He wrote with a passion, but when survival purely on writing became a challenge, young Bond decided to move to the city.
He left for Delhi in 1959, “To find a regular office job that could provide me with financial stability,” he adds. Bond then started working for CARE (the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere), an international relief agency.
But his heart was set on the written word. “I left Delhi in 1963. I was tired of the regular desk job as it was leaving me with little or no time to pursue my literary career,” he says. Little deliberation and he finally made up his mind to set up home in the Queen of Hills, Mussoorie. “A relatively inexpensive hill station in those days,” he tells us. Bond rented Oakland Cottage and lived there with a young boy Prem and his newly wedded wife Chandra who took care of the author’s needs.
A few years down the line, he moved base to Maplewood Lodge, where he lived until 1976. “Before taking up permanent boarding at Ivy Cottage, Landour, where I live with my grandson Rakesh, his wife Beena, and their doting children and my cat,” he adds with a smile as the black and white feline purrs, as if on cue, from her cozy cushion next to his chair.
The writing order
Even today, the grand old man of the hills, can be caught writing profusely; he has more than a hundred stories, essays, and novels, and over 50 children’s books to his credit, along with screenplays for Bollywood movies as well.
Apart from Ruskin Bond’s work being part of the Indian curriculum, his books have been translated into French, Spanish, German and Danish along with over a dozen Indian regional languages. The popularity of his books may be judged by the rapidity with which his books go into reprint.
Our “Wordsworth in prose”, as he is affectionately called, has received highly prestigious awards. In 1987, he was awarded the Indian Council for Child Education Award for his “pivotal role in the development of children’s literature in India”. The Sahitya Academy Award for English Writing in India in the year 1992; Padma Shri in 1999 for his novella Our trees still grow in Dehra; and the fourthhighest civilian award in the country, the Padma Bhushan in the 2014, by President Pranab Mukherjee.
Now in his eighty-second year, Bond looks back with nostalgia over half a century of dedication to the gentle art of writing. As we take leave of this literary giant who has generously contributed towards making three generations of children into book readers and book lovers in embryo, he sets about, yet again, to the task of penning stories to amuse and entertain young minds.
We wish more power to his unstoppable pen.