‘It’s hard to stop me from writing’: Ruskin Bond on why he simply can’t stop writing

A boy with an extra thumb who excels in spin bowling and a beauty contest of birds with an owl for a judge and a tiny redstart for a winner. 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. Ruskin Bond on his love for writingWhile some bonds endured, others got lost in the passage of time and history. Omar from the story, The Playing Fields of Simla, was one such friend. “He was actually Azhar. Up to 1947, one-third of the boys in our school (Bishop Cotton School) were Muslims, from Lahore, from as far as Peshawar. When Partition came, they had to be evacuated overnight in trucks under military escort. We lost one-third of our school and many friends,” he says. As he writes in the story, he heard of Omar some 17 or 18 years later when India and Pakistan were at war. “…In a bombing raid over Ambala, not far from Simla, a Pakistani plane was shot down. Its crew died later in the crash. One of them, I learnt later, was Omar…Did he, I wonder, get a glimpse of the playing fields we knew so well as boys?” he writes. Making friends is no longer so easy though. “To begin with, I was a shy boy till I was 15 or 16. Then I started making friends more easily. Now I am going back to my childhood days, I am finding it difficult to make friends again. There has to be a meeting ground. There is so much materialism now. In our time, money didn’t come to our mind when making friends,” he says. Confined mainly to the house, Bond finds himself going back often in time. The past also resurfaced recently in his book The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns: A Journey Through Time (Aleph, 2026). “I know fewer people to write about so one writes about the past which, for me, is very vivid. I have a very good memory. I used to be a film buff. I can tell you the cast of almost all the films made in the 1940s and early 50s,” he says. It’s the past that he continues to turn to for memories and storylines. “But I am not writing a novel or anything long. I may not be able to finish it because after all, I cannot live forever. I am just flitting ahead, week by week, month by month and that’s nice in a way because you don’t have to make too many plans,” laughs Bond.