Keeping up with Ruskin Bond

An ode to the author as he turns 91.

- By RIA SINGH

How often do characters of a story walk off the page and into your life? In a Ruskin Bond book, the characters are the story—he begins and ends with them, and the story belongs to these vivid personalities. Take for example The Night Train at Deoli, it was published almost 40 years ago, but that girl with the basket is still standing on the platform, waiting for Bond to get off the train, take her by the hand and walk away with her. Same is the case in Love Is a Sad Song where Sushila lingers in Bond’s memory—still coy, still 16, and forever on the cusp of an unfulfilled promise. Or think of The Overcoat, where that soft and frayed overcoat, folded neatly by Julie, still lies by her lonely grave. The Anglo-Indian author's characters do not age, carrying the same charm they did when I first read his stories. And it is through these characters, readers discover a companion we have all yearned for but never got.

Born Owen Ruskin Bond in 1934, in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, he was the eldest child of Aubrey Alexander Bond and Edith Clarke. He spent his early years in Jamnagar, Gujarat, where his father ran a small school for royal children. When Aubrey later joined the Royal Air Force, Bond’s childhood was spent in cities like Delhi, Shimla, Mussoorie, and Dehradun. But as Bond was growing up, at just four years old, his parents separated, and at the age of 10, his father died of malaria while stationed in Kolkata.