irritable vowel syndrome. Ruskin Bond: The man on the mountain

At night, from my room on the roof in Doon Valley, I can see the twinkling lights of Landour. Some of those starry lights, I imagine, belong to Ivy Cottage — Ruskin Bond’s residence on the outskirts of Mussoorie, from where he benevolently gazes on the ‘plains’ writers down below, toiling away at their unfinished manuscripts. The lights of Landour are Bond’s twinkling eyes.

Born in 1934, Bond turned 85 earlier this month. Bond’s popularity is such that, at times, his best-selling success overshadows the fact that he is also a serious literary writer. VS Naipaul and Bond, both contemporaries, started their writing careers at the publishing firm Andre Deutsch Ltd, when Diana Athill was the editor. At the firm, Athill worked closely, sentence by sentence, with many of the young bright lights of the post-WWII era: Jean Rhys, Jack Kerouac, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer and Margaret Atwood.

Bond recalls Athill with fondness, “I was lonely in London. Diana, even though she was 15 years my senior, was the person I knew best. She’d invite me for the occasional meal to her place in Regent’s Park. We went to the pictures together, and to the theatre once or twice.” They continued to correspond over the years.

Like many, I too grew up on Bond’s stories and novels. But I’ve shied away from knocking on his door — enough readers do it anyway. This year I made an exception: I went up to meet the man on the mountain.

Bond has just returned from Kolkata. His knees are hurting as he shows me around the cottage. He’s dressed in his trademark sleeveless sweater. The dining table, where he writes sometimes, is crammed with seven kinds of pickles. Bond is a pickle fiend.

The windows in his study open out to a hazy view of the Doon Valley. The study itself, though cosy, has a Spartan simplicity to it: The tin trunk underneath the single bed, a desk and a chair, a chest of drawers. He says: “I do all my thinking lying down.”

Crowd favourite: Bond’s enduring appeal among children leads to serpentine queues for his autograph

I hand him a copy of one of my Bond favourites, The Hidden Pool , published in 1966. I want him to sign it for me. “It’s a first edition!” he exclaims. “Where did you get it from?” “My mother, Vandana, introduced me to your writing as a boy. She’s preserved all my childhood books in my parents’ Allahabad apartment. Even the Enid Blytons,” I tell him. Bond pauses mid-signature. He says, “Now Enid Blyton, she was too goody-goody for me. I preferred the Just William series,” referring to the memorable naughty-boy character created by Blyton’s compatriot Richmal Crompton.

I tell Bond that he’s a bit like the proverbial snowman, amiable not abominable. My friends, visiting Landour from Delhi, report Bond sightings to me. “I saw him driving a white Volkswagen Polo.”

The conversation turns to cars. The sighting, as with the snowman, turns out to be a false one. Bond owns two Fords although he prefers not to drive himself. He recounts the time in Delhi when, as a young man learning to drive, he drove a Land Rover into a brick wall near a roundabout and “ended up on someone’s lawn”. He’d interrupted a tea-party in progress.

Bond sighs, “I had to pay for that wall. I’m very impractical. If I’m given a tumble down cottage to live in, it’ll remain tumble down. I even hate the landline phone.” He writes on a notepad with a ballpoint pen.

Bond has to file his taxes in June. It turns out we share the same chartered accountant. He jokes, “Next month, I have to finish my major work of non-fiction. It must be a sign of success that the refunds have dried up.”

To mark his 85th, Puffin will release a new Bond book, Coming Round the Mountain , about how Independence affected the school-life of a 12-year-old boy. It’s the third volume of a series that includes Looking for the Rainbow and Till the Clouds Roll By , the titles being taken from popular songs of the time.

Back from London in 1955, Bond took up residence in Astley Hall, Dehradun, and put the Indian Postal Service to good use. In his memoir The Beauty of All My Days , he describes how he made ends meet: “Jobless and cashless, the only way I could earn some money was by bombarding all the magazines and Sunday papers in the land with my stories and articles.”

He lists their names: Sainik Samachar, Sport and Pastime (published by The Hindu ), publisher Baburao Patel’s Mother India (a film magazine), The Statesman, The Tribune of Ambala , The Leader of Allahabad, while also sending stories to the BBC’s Home Service. He wrote until the ‘b’ on his Baby Royal typewriter broke off.

Writers and readers: Bond with Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Bond was paid ₹50 for an article, managing to earn around ₹400 in a month, “which was sufficient for my modest needs — books, the occasional film and meals in a variety of small restaurants and dhabas”. The Illustrated Weekly , under editor CR Mandy (later the subject of an FN Souza portrait), was a “great standby”. He managed to further reduce the costs of trips to the cinema: “I made friends with the manager of the Odeon in Mussoorie. In those days they played records during the interval. I had a large collection at home. I handed the records to the manager, who gave me a free season pass. All I had to pay was four annas in entertainment tax.”

Picture Palace was the other cinema hall in the area, one of the oldest in the country. There were times the projectionist mixed up the reels, but “films often arrived in Mussoorie badly cut and incomplete”. This, Bond claims, only “enhanced” the mystery of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. “ Rear Window (1954) was shown backwards without anyone complaining; the audience thought it was just another Hitchcock trick.”

The pauperish world of freelancing was not without its scams. Bond was a frequent contributor to My Magazine of India , which appeared from Madras. One morning, Bond discovered that instead of the usual ₹5 money order, the magazine had sent him one for ₹2 and eight annas. Bond banged out a “nasty letter” on the Royal. The magazine confessed that they had gone ahead and deducted a year’s subscription without Bond’s permission.

Before turning to writing full time, Bond tried his hand at various jobs: In London, he worked at a grocery store and a photo accessories firm; then for Thomas Cook (he was fired); and at the Public Health Department in Jersey in the Channel Islands. In Delhi, he worked for the NGO CARE, which gave him a Yashica camera — but he soon lost interest in photography, finding it “too intrusive”. In the early ’70s, Bond replaced poet Dom Moraes as the editor of Imprint magazine, which he edited from Landour.

Not many know that Bond is also an accomplished poet. His poetry collection I Was The Wind Last Night: New and Collected Poems was published in 2017. The only commercial flop he’s ever delivered was a book of prayers, To Live in Magic , in 1980. Bond describes himself as a “subjective” writer: “A subjective writer writes from his own life. He finds it harder to find readers and longer too.”

Bond is known for his reclusive nature, though some of it is pure folklore: “I was not the complete recluse, the companion only of birds, ladybirds and wild creatures. Friends from Delhi would often come to stay with me. I went on picnics; I watched football games at the nearby school; I strolled along the Mall with the tourists; I talked to the rickshaw boys; I sat in Kwality’s and drank beer and put on weight.”

A touch of writerly misanthropy creeps in when he talks of the “super technology that imprisons us, making us slaves of our phones. We are the true robots, not those sad mechanical creatures created in our own image”. For him, writers today have become “mini-celebrities because of the Internet and TV. Earlier, if you were successful you were a name, a personage. It was tough selling books back then, but then it’s always tough selling books”.

Of course, now Bond’s fame is such that schoolchildren form serpentine queues to get his books signed, at times with comical consequences. Autographically speaking, Bond represents many writers. “Once, these parents nudged their boy towards me, saying that he studied my book in school. When I asked which one, he said: Tom Sawyer. I signed Mark Twain for him. Another time, this girl came up to me and asked: When will you write your next Mowgli story? I remember one girl though who refused to have her copy of my book signed by me. She insisted she only wanted Shakespeare’s autograph.”

In his writing, Bond aims for clarity, “the right word in the right place”. He doesn’t trust overnight literary success: “It should be a long journey. I enjoy the process of writing. I was writing even when I wasn’t getting published. If four or five days go by and I haven’t written anything, I feel incomplete. Most of what I’ve written is in book form. There’s very little that has been wasted.”

There’s only one thing that ruffles Bond’s gentleness and earned sense of contentment: “I don’t have copies of my photographs. Publishers plunder my albums and forget to return the photos.”

Publishers, if you’re reading, you know what to do.

Palash Krishna Mehrotra is the author of Eunuch Park and the editor of Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays

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