‘It’s hard to stop me from writing’: Ruskin Bond on why he simply can’t stop writing
These are just two of the half-a-dozen stories that Ruskin Bond has conjured up, propped in his bed in a spacious room in a leafy villa in Dehradun’s tony Dalanwala as he recovers from a spinal surgery he underwent a few months ago. “Lying here, my imagination works overtime,” he smiles. “I can’t walk up the steep stairs of my house in Mussoorie but I don’t mind being here. After all, I grew up here. My grandfather settled here in the 1900s, he was here from the time that the first train came in,” says the author of Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra (1991), who turned 92 on May 19. The surgery may have confined him mainly to a room, but his mind has been free to roam around everywhere. “It’s hard to stop me from writing. Even though now I can’t see well enough to write by hand as I used to, I dictate my stories to my granddaughter,’’ says Bond, speaking on the sidelines of The Ruskin Bond Literature Festival held in Dehradun, presented by StoneX Global and The Ruskin Bond Foundation. One of India’s most prolific writers, his recent book, All-Time Favourite Friendship Stories (Penguin), a collection of stories, some new, some old, explores the theme of friendship. Friends have been a constant in many of Bond’s works — some have been fictional while others have been real figures. “Somi was very real,” says Bond, of one of the key characters in his first book, the semi-autobiographical, The Room on the Roof (1956), written when he was just 17. “It was in 1951 and I had just finished my schooling and came to Dehradun, trying to write. Somi was from a Sikh family who came here as refugees during the Partition,” says Bond of the younger brother of Everester Major HPS Ahluwalia. “He is settled in America but seven or eight years ago, he came to see me after nearly 70 years. He had grey hair and I had grey hair but we were the same,” he laughs.
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