Bonding with the best

“I haven’t been sitting idle, you know. People think I’m resting on my laurels in Mussoorie, but I started writing this book last year and it’s good to see it published,” says Bond. A book for young children, The Parrot Who Wouldn’t Talk is a collection of bite-sized stories about Bond’s eccentric relatives who enlivened his childhood when he was growing up in Dehradun in the early 1940s. The stories have been illustrated by Kavita Arvind and are tales in typical Ruskin Bond fashion.

Writing for children has always been a rather difficult task, he acknowledges, no matter how effortless it may seem. “Earlier the problem was that nobody published children’s books and there wasn’t really a reading culture. Now, the problem is that children have plenty of distractions. But I do think parents are more enlightened now and work hard on inculcating the reading habit,” says Bond.

As a young boy, Bond says he always knew that he wanted to be a writer and tell stories. “My first advance was 50 pounds, the standard sum for book advances in those days. And it was a princely sum. I sailed back to India from England, soon after and freelanced from Dehradun for a few years while I was writing my books,” says Bond. The Room of the Roof, written when he was 17 years old, won the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. “The prize money was 50 pounds too and that was a good year, I made a 100 pounds,” chuckles Bond.

Having just completed two film scripts for Vishal Bharadwaj who also adapted his novella The Blue Umbrella to a movie last year, Bond is looking forward to seeing some new film projects take off.

“Bharadwaj is extremely gifted and kept the charm of The Blue Umbrella intact in his film. We’re working together on two scripts, one is a thriller set in Lucknow and the other is a black comedy located in Meerut. In today’s small town India, anything can happen,” says Bond. He quotes his own little experience with a local reporter in Doon. “I don’t think we communicated very well, given my broken Hindi and his limited English. When I told him of the scripts, the next day his report said that I was acting in a film!” laughs Bond.