From his perch on a first-floor house on the edge of a spur in Landour, Ruskin Bond has watched the world change amidst the unchanged mountains. Landour, once a quiet outpost of Mussoorie in Uttarakhand that went quieter when the air turned cold and the days became short, now has an all-season pass. On every must-visit reel on Instagram, Landour has day trippers and overnighters trooping in, ensuring it has no dull days anymore. Some of them manage to make their way up the steep stairs to meet Bond. Not all are lucky, though. “Tourists come for selfies at all hours, when I am sleeping or early in the morning. Now that I am old and don’t always keep well, I can’t meet too many people. But I do meet children sometimes,” says the author who turns 91 on May 19. The visitors that Bond, one of India’s most prolific and loved writers, receives are varied — children, with parents in tow and writers in search of a foreword. Then, there are the honeymooners. Bond, who has remained single lifelong, hasn’t quite figured out why the couples have chosen him for the honour. Some visits are fun. “Two weeks ago, a Sikh lady came from England. Her brother had been a boy with me in Dilaram Bazar in Dehradun in the 1950s. I hadn’t seen her since then. It was so nice seeing her. In those days, I was very poor, I had just started to write and she thought I was still poor — there is really nothing magnificent about my house,” he says, pointing at the study and the dining room and kitchen that lie ahead. “So when she was going, she stuffed some notes into my pocket. I thought it would look bad if I force them back on her, so I kept them. They were two thousand rupees and I thought, nice, getting pocket money again,” he says. “But that’s not a hint that people should put money in my pockets,” he laughs. Ivy Cottage in Landour has been Bond’s home since 1980. It is from the windows of his bedroom overlooking the road below that he has let the world come in and weave in with his words. “The old building has been kind to me,” he says. ****** Bond’s run-up to his birthday is, perhaps, different from most people’s. His preparations are less to do with parties and more to do with books, His book, 'Another Day in Landour: Looking Out from My Window' (HarperCollins), has just released and he has another coming out on his birthday. “Another Day in Landour is sort of extracts from a journal kept a year before last, just a year after Covid. It’s not very long but I enjoyed putting it together,” says the author who has a formidable repertoire of short stories, novellas and poems. He likes to write early in the mornings, sitting in his front balcony, catching the early sun. “Sometimes I will write every day and then there will be days when I won’t,” says Bond, showing a page written in his hand for a forthcoming book. He still writes by hand and mails the original or its photocopy to his publishers. “Now the post office wants to interview me to encourage people to write more letters because no one is using them anymore. So I guess I am the last man standing who is still writing by hand, the last writer who still writes with a pen, a ballpoint usually,” he says. He doesn’t go out much these days, happy to be home in his snug study, reading and writing or looking out of his window to the mountains across from his cosy, strip-like bedroom. Mountains, mountain folks, a blade of grass, a laughing thrush — the subject of his books haven’t changed all that much over the years even though the world around him has altered dramatically. “But I do touch on the world nowadays in this journal and in my next book too there are random reflections on life as it was and as it is today. There is even something about my disenchantment with world politics,” he says. Watching news every evening especially to “see what Trump” is up to, reading biographies and history — he is reading one on the Zulu Wars at present—and watching an occasional true-crime series on OTT, keeps him busy. “The world has changed and it has changed for the better only in the sense of technology and being more comfortable but human beings haven’t changed. In my ninety years on this planet, I haven’t seen people change very much. They have all the faults that they used to have and the virtues too,” he adds. “Children, of course, are growing up in a different world, they are growing up with technology, But only this morning I saw kids, they were quick to abandon their phones when there was a prospect of ice cream on the table.” Bond, whose first novel, The Room on the Roof, published in 1956, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, has found a huge readership among the young. “What appeals to them, perhaps, in my writing is that there has always been a slightly rebellious streak going back to the early days,” he says. Bond started out writing for the general reader and only took to writing for children when he was in his forties. He doesn't quite agree that children are not reading anymore. “We complain that children don’t read but in terms of actual numbers, there are far more readers today than there were 20 or 40 years ago. At that time education was limited — at least as far as English went — to a few public or private schools. Not everybody could afford them. So the number of young people who could read was limited whereas now the number of young people who can read is vast. So even if it is a small number that reads, in terms of actual numbers, they are thousands and hundreds of thousands. That small minority in terms of numbers is quite vast which is why publishers are doing fairly well. When I started out, you had to look for a publisher abroad,” he says. The number of literary festivals mushrooming all over small-town India, perhaps, only shows that there is a growing, diverse group of readers. Reading, says Bond, in any case, has always been the pursuit of a minority. “In my final year of school, in a class of about 30 boys, there were just two or three of us who actually read books — and at that time there were none of the distractions that we blame today. There were no televisions, no laptops, no phones, on which you could have had a different kind of life,” says Bond, who studied at the Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, where he was football captain and where he won essay writing three years running. But even in this wired world, Bond says, he gets at least five or six handwritten letters from his readers every week. “They take the trouble to write by hand. They know I am illiterate as far as technology goes,” says Bond, who still doesn’t keep a phone. “Fortunately I have a large adopted family who does all this for me. I don’t have a laptop. I still write by hand and I have a good handwriting so my publishers are quite happy with it,” says the author who has retired his old typewriter to a quiet spot in a cupboard. ****** The old typewriter was once his fellow traveller on a long and often rough journey as a writer that began in the 1950s. Born in Kasauli, Bond, who grew up in Jamnagar where his father set up a small palace school for the princes and princesses before joining the Royal Air Force, journeyed through Dehradun, England and Delhi where he worked with American relief organisation CARE, before finally putting roots in Mussoorie in 1963. He then became a full-time writer. “After four years, I was fed up with my job and of living in Delhi. I said I am going to go up to the hills and I am going to live entirely on my writing. I took a big risk because I hadn’t saved much money but in those days, Mussoorie was an ideal place for a writer because it was very cheap. You could get a house on rent for practically nothing because the hill station was going through a slump in the ’60s and ’70s,” he says. So he started living in Maplewood Lodge for an annual rent of Rs 500. “It was ideal for a struggling writer,” he says. Publishing his short stories in magazines and newspapers became his primary source of income. “I used to bombard every paper and magazine in the land,” he says. The Illustrated Weekly of India paid him the best, about Rs 50 per story. “There was a little magazine in Chennai, I used to send them all my rejects. They would publish most of them and send me a five-rupee money order for each story. One month, I got this money order for two rupees eight annas. I was furious, I wrote them a stinker saying why have you reduced my rate of payment. They wrote back saying, ‘Sorry Mr Bond, we haven’t cut your rate of payment, we have simply deducted a one-year subscription to the magazine',” he laughs. In those days five rupees would go far — they would get him three film tickets or two paperbacks or a trip down to the Chaat Corner in Dehradun. “I was a great one for tikkis and golgappas,” says Bond. Among his many accomplishments, he counts winning a tikki-eating competition, polishing off 20 of them, as one. “Looking at my figure you can tell I am fond of food. I like a Malabar fish curry and pickles,” he says. The struggle to publish has been long over. “Things have gotten better over the years but it has been a long journey, a long literary journey.” ****** It’s dusk and Bond stands at his bedroom window, pointing to the dark mountains across and the Doon Valley that lies below, spread like a sea of twinkling stars. Living in the hills has shaped much of his writing. “I write a lot about nature, birds, trees and that became more a part of my work after I came to live in the hills. In the early stories, The Room on the Roof, The Night Train at Deoli and others, nature didn't play such an important role as it did in the writing that I did after I came to live in the hills,” he says. In the years since he has been in Landour, he has seen the sleepy cantonment town transform. Once an outpost of American missionaries and now a sought-after corner of the hills, it is home to writer Stephen Alter, actor Victor Banerjee and director Vishal Bhardwaj, who turned Bond's The Blue Umbrella and Susanna’s Seven Husbands (7 Khoon Maaf) into films. “In the ’60s, ’70s, no one bothered to come up here. Even when Mussoorie was booming, even in the old days, no one came here. It was just the defence establishment and a few American missionaries connected to Woodstock School. It’s all in the last 10-15 years that it’s become a tourist destination,” he says. “Chaar dukaan is aath dukaan now,” he says referring to the famous cluster of four shops that regulars and tourists drop by for chai, pancakes and more. The changes, though swift, haven’t unsettled him. “The life of the hill station changes in more subtle ways. Today we get tourists pouring in but they are day-trippers or weekend-trippers whereas, say, 50 years ago, people would come up for a period of time, for a summer holiday. Now you drive up and the next day you drive back. That’s very much the lifestyle of a hill station where the pace has changed,” he says. Growing traffic and congestion have meant walking is no longer a preferred activity. “Everyone wants to be in their car now. Some of the people come up, take a round in their cars and don’t even get out of the car. It’s very funny. People are forgetting to walk. Earlier, we had very few roads in the hills. Many of the border roads came up after the 1962 Chinese War,” says Bond. Uttarakhand now has a vast network of roads, including the soon-to-be-completed Delhi-Dehradun Expressway and the ambitious and controversial under-construction Char Dham Highway. Till age caught up, Bond was quite a walker. “I used to walk a lot in my 30s and 40s. I once walked from Mussoorie to Tehri on what was just a mule track. The first day I got to a place called Kaddukhal and spent the night in a wayside teashop. They gave me a sheepskin rug to sleep on and at about 2 in the morning, I woke up scratching all over because the rug was full of bugs. Next morning, I got up in a hurry and continued walking,” he says. He may not be able to spend much time outdoors anymore but he engages with the world outside by reading newspapers, watching news and sports and through his family — son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren — who live with him. That engagement and his observation of the natural world is what keeps him writing. “I love putting words together and expressing my thoughts. I am a very personal kind of writer. I enjoy the process of writing. I am not a very imaginative writer, I don’t write fantasy or science fiction although I do the odd ghost story. I guess it’s something I have always done and I can’t see myself doing anything else particularly well,” says Bond. Outside on the street, a familiar scene plays out. Two excited children and their mother walk up the road near the steep stairs looking for Mr Ruskin Bond’s house, hoping to meet him. Will they be in luck?
