Ruskin Bond turns 91, and releases his latest book
'I am a very lazy writer,' declares Ruskin Bond, with a Duchenne smile that extends to his eyes, twinkling behind thick, black-framed spectacles. A couple of pages a day is all that he is committed to writing because 'I think if I worked too hard, I wouldn't write well. I've got to enjoy it'.
Bond's daily routine certainly sounds rather idyllic. 'I like to write for an hour or two, usually before breakfast, because there is not much disturbance,' says Bond, whose reputation as a highly accessible writer often leads to random strangers ringing his doorbell at frequent intervals. 'Young people sleep very late now and are not getting up till noon, so I am safe till then,' he laughs. 'I give up some time every day to writing and a lot of time to reading, apart from sleeping and eating.'
Writing leisurely also seems to have been the secret to his long career — the prolific author has written over 500 short stories and more than 70 books for children, besides several essays, and novellas since he began his writing journey in 1956, with The Room on the Roof, penned when he was all of 17. 'Writing has got to be a pleasant job. That is how I have managed to keep going for so long,' he insists.
Even when he had his doubts, it was 'sheer stubbornness' that kept him going, choosing the writerly life over and over again, remarks Bond. 'You know, in those early years, paying the bills could be a problem. I could send an article or a story, but it took time, sometimes, to get paid.' But he took it in his stride, approaching it like an adventure, he says. 'When you are young and single and healthy, you can do these things. You can take this risk and put up with certain hardships or difficulties or shortage of funds.'
Ultimately, of course, his persistence, coupled with his confidence in the ability to write, paid off. 'It is a matter of establishing one's name,' he says, referring to it as an ongoing process. 'I've never stopped writing… sitting back and saying that I've done enough and that I've got nothing more to say,' says Bond, whose latest book, Life's Magic Moments (Penguin India, ₹ 399), was launched on May 19, coinciding with his 91st birthday. It also helps that he keeps a journal, 'not very regularly, but I've had many periods where I've put down my feelings, thoughts and observations,' he says, adding, 'There is always something to say if you are observant. A writer shouldn't run out of materials or ideas.'
Real life clearly inspires Bond, the creator of some of literature's most memorable characters, including Rusty, a young Anglo-Indian boy, clearly based on Bond himself, eccentric relatives like Uncle Ken and Aunt Mabel and a vast menagerie of animals, like Toto the monkey, Harold the hornbill and Timothy the tiger. 'I'm not very good at making up characters who are purely fictional,' confesses Bond, who relies on his excellent memory, instead, basing his stories on people he has actually encountered. 'Basically, they start off as real people. While putting them in a story, they might acquire different characteristics and change into different people,' he says. 'By and large, I change characters a bit so they don't always recognise themselves.'
Exploring life's magic moments
Life's Magic Moments, too, is culled from his own life, an amalgamation of observations, reflections, musings, and memories about it. 'I send you these little confidences — quiet thoughts of a quiet fellow — telling you something about my life, my writing, the world around me and the passage of time,' he writes in the book's foreword. 'Allow me to share some of my golden days with you.'
From the sudden blooming of a tiny yellow flower in an abandoned flowerpot to the joy of knowing that he can still read, despite his fading eyesight, and the delight of discovering a mountain spring on a hot day, the book is chock-full of what the world of trauma therapy would likely describe as 'glimmers', those tiny moments of positivity, gratitude and beauty that help us feel calm and connected to the world we live in. 'There is joy in small things, too,' he further states in the foreword. 'Look for the ladybird, the firefly in the night.'
There is more to the book, including the secret pleasures offered by tin roofs and windows, Bond's deep, if somewhat perilous, affinity towards pickles, the close relationship between cheerfulness and corpulence and, my personal favourite — the appearance of a rather ornery three-legged, semi-Persian cat named Mimi, who constantly tussles with Bond 'for the occupancy of the easy chair,' he writes, pointing out that if she loses, she takes her revenge by sitting down on the leafiest geranium. 'She is very arrogant and aristocratic, not the type of cat who'll sit on your lap,' he says, with a guffaw. 'She is the boss here… rules the roost… is the managing director of the household.'
Long before Indian ecofiction became mainstream, Bond has been writing about animals and trees and revelling in Nature, gently hinting at larger themes like climate crisis, human-animal conflict, and shrinking wild spaces, without ever sounding pedantic, preachy or grimly prophetic. This deep, abiding love for the natural world finds its way into every page of the book, which is packed with ruminations about flowers, trees, earthworms, butterflies, birds and more.
'My relationship with Nature is deep, but it has grown over the years,' he agrees, adding that it was not so deep or so passionate when he was younger. 'When we are young, we take everything for granted: the trees, the forests, the animals,' he explains. Only later does worry set in as one begins to wonder what is going wrong with the planet since these wonderful creations are not there anymore, he says. 'I am in my dressing gown and sweater, and having to use a heater in the middle of summer. It is pretty obvious that it is climate change, and I don't know how some world leaders can deny it.'
Despite his vast body of work and the many accolades he has received for it over the years, including a John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Padma Bhushan in 2014, Bond insists that reading has always been his first love. 'Even though I have got a couple of hundred titles in print, I am a reader first and a writer second,' he says. So much so that if he is halfway through writing a story and a book he has been wanting to read arrives in the mail, 'I'll immediately put my work aside and start reading, which means that I am really a reader,' he says. 'I often feel that people who don't read are missing out on something in life.'
So, does it bother Bond that, in an age with so many distractions, the world has fewer readers? 'No, not really,' he responds. 'There never were many readers. It has always been a minority pastime.' According to him, in the 1940s and 50s, before television, laptops, mobiles and apps, there were only two boys in his class of 35 at school who read books for pleasure. 'We had a good library, and everyone had to take a book out of the library every week, but most people did not read them. They put them back unread,' he says. 'Actual book lovers have always been few, the exception rather than the rule.'
He believes that, in fact, thanks to better access to education and with more people simply being able to read, there are actually more readers today. 'Today, I make a living out of my books, which I could not have done in the 1950s and 60s,' feels Bond, who says that he has already written two successors to Life's Magic Moments as well as some children's stories, 'enough to keep my publishers busy for the next year or so,' he says. He is also 5,000-odd words into his next project, a short book on the small towns of India, and is also working on a few stories for children.
'I've quite a busy work schedule. But, who knows, it is not in my hands,' he says, with a laugh. 'The great librarian above decides these things.'
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