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That was the first time I heard of an author in Mussoorie. Just as well! Of course, the name that would soon become a legend, lends itself to many variations. Where did it begin this word play on his name? I’m not too sure. Maybe with the tipsy lady at the Doon Club who’d had one pink gin too many. She steadied herself, looked at him up, looked him down and said: "Oh! You’re that well-known writer fellow, BunskinRond!" "Yes ma’am!" nodded Ruskin. "In the south they also call me Ruskin Bonda, in Punjabi Bagh they called me Rexin Bond!" An apocryphal tale is attributed to an All India Anglo-Indian meet in Delhi, where one of the not-so-literate participants stood up and announced: "We must do something for that author fellow too!" At the crucial moment, his memory failed him, he’d forgotten the name. "Who are you talking about?" asked the hosts. "Oh! You know that writer fellow? What’s his name? Oh! That chap who writes about the birds and bees!" "You mean Ruskin Bond? You idiot!" exclaimed the unflappable Frank Anthony as he gave the poor soul a severe tongue-lashing. But the quibbles around his name are but trivia. What is well and truly monumental is the hard work, earnest application and effort that has gone in to become a writer. A struggle of over fifty years and more!
The Mussoorie connection, if one may call it that, goes back to April 1963. Invited to lunch by the Principal of one of our schools, he met Miss Bean, a lonesome old lady who lived nearby. "I’d like to give up my present assignment," he said, adding: "Would like to write full-time." "Why don’t you rent the upstairs of Maplewood Cottage?" said Miss Bean. "I just use the one room on the ground floor." From Rajouri Garden came Kamal and Anil, whom he’d taken under his wing. Today, Anil’s eyes mist up as memories of another day well up: "I’d just come 36th in a class of 36!" he tells me. "I was all of seven years old when my father deserted my mother to settle in England. Ruskin had just come back from England (after the publication of his first novel The Room on the Roof) and was living in Rajouri Garden with his mother." "I’m headed to hills, to Mussoorie," he told Anil’s mother. "Let the boy come with me and I’ll put him into a good school up there." "36th in a class of
36!" my mother moaned, wondering which school would admit the
boy?
"Soon after, nonetheless, I found myself grasping his finger as I walked through the gates of a school," he reminisces on a return journey forty years later, adding, almost as an after-thought: "Ah! He’d read David Copperfield to me in the evenings. It planted in me a love for reading. In the first test, I came 3rd in class. Ever since that day, I’ve always stayed among the top three!" Ruskin was to see Anil through school, medical college and then on to America where he practises medicine. Next day, Ruskin had paid Marjorie Gordon, the landlady a year’s rent of Rs 400. "It was that simple!" he shrugs, remembering: "I liked unhurried pace and I was not too far from the familiar Dehra of my youth." "I wound up things in Delhi and moved into the little cottage a month later," he tells me. Though at the end of the year, Mrs Hathisingh talked him into leaving the place and move to Oaklands, a little further up the hill. While staying here, Ruskin met Mrs Sharma, a lecturer in English at one of the universities. "Hello!" she said to me, "You’re Ruskin Bond!" "Even in those pre-television days, people would occasionally recognise me and ask me to come over for lunch or dinner. And with her, it wasn’t just a question of which daughter would be right for me. She wasn’t just a matchmaker; she was a real match fixer! "She ended up fixing all these matches for her daughters. Asked me to come and stay as her guest. A real phuljhari, she was. She was widowed, her husband having died young. Her eldest was from her first marriage. This one had gone to London and become a doctor there. Nothing to look at but a good-natured girl, strong willed with a mind of her own, assertive. She would always do her own thing. She smoked. She drank. She wanted to be a man. I don’t know what her would-be husband saw in her. I think the mother phasaoed him. She was a very jolly person. Good to chat and laugh with. "The second daughter was pretty and sexy and the third was also very pretty and good-looking. Later, she married a filmstar, presumably is still married to him. I had only known her two days and she was kissing me, wrapping me in her arms. A very passionate girl but she put me off a couple of weeks later by showing me earlier love-letters that various boyfriends had written to her, I’m going back to 1963-64 when I was just thirty, a slim and eligible bachelor or so I thought! They don’t wrap me in their arms any more..." "I met them during my days in Oaklands, at Mrs Hathisingh’s house; Mrs Sharma owned a house that has vanished. These cane chairs in my sitting room, which I have even today, solid ones, she gave me. They are a constant reminder of her. Amazing how they made those chairs! "Nearby lived the Ramadevi School Principal, Mr Malhotra, who invited me to see his roses.Yes! He had this great rose-garden. But I had gone to see him to try and get Kamal admitted into Class X. He had never passed any exams before that. I admired the roses and on the strength of that he gave Kamal admission. In those days, all it took was my saying: ‘Your roses are nice!’ Admissions are more difficult these days. But dark, ominous clouds were rolling in not from the mountains but from next door where lived the nosey Mrs Hathisingh, suspicious of all the young girls visiting Ruskin’s the flat. "I had a feeling she was eaves-dropping!’ Ruskin remembers. Time had come to move further down the hill. The next watering-hole, home and shelter was a lovely cottage, Wayside Cottage. The year 1965. "It had a great garden!" he remembers. "Annie Powell was a gentle soul who was content to live out the rest of her days tending her sweet-peas." While here, his nearest neighbour was Morris Alexander, who was working in the school office. "His kababs were excellent. I’m afraid the music wasn’t in the same league for he insisted on singing to the accompaniment of a wheezing harmonium." Small wonder, then, that Ruskin moved back to Maplewood Cottage a year later, a stone’s throw away, renting it again from Miss Bean. A family begins Sometimes it could get lonely in the little cottage on the edge of the forest, Around this time, Prem Singh, a young boy from the hills of Garhwal came to him in search of work. It seemed like a good idea and soon he was helping Ruskin in running the house. On a visit to his village, Prem married Bhaga, She came to the cottage, when their first-born Rakesh was a three months old. Finally, a family had begun. It has taken Ruskin from being a grandfather to great grandfather without marriage in between! "Oh no! Pregnant again" I heard a voice complain as tumble down a rubble-strewn path and lift the latch on the gate of Maplewood Cottage. Its author Ruskin Bond talking to his pet Samoyed. "Look! Just last year she had an affair with the neighbours’ cocker spaniel and I had to take her in the rain, in a pram, to the vet and she’s pregnant again." It was to be the first of many meetings. I was still in college where I had heard of ‘A sahib who writes all day’ and I imagined him to be like Phantom – the ghost who walks all night! Indeed, he has a gentle charm. It has kept him going even as he wanders around the hill side identifying wildflowers for children or just listening patiently to the local baker’s complaint of poor yeast and as the years have sieved by, yesterday’s Dr Do Nothing was soon his way to becoming an institution. Our present-day arrival’s must-do includes Kempty Falls, LalTibba and author Ruskin Bond! Poor man! How they test his patience! Especially, when aroused bleary eyed like a bear from his siesta as tourists arrive at Ivy Cottage in the middle of the afternoon waiting for him to bless their honeymoon or their children or to get photographed. Perhaps, they have nothing better to do. At the time of writing, Ruskin lives in Ivy Cottage, with his large extended family. In this perch lives a contented man who has found his true place in life, and is happy with what he has got. Of course, there have been good times and bad times, but the good times have predominated. He remains the gentle voice of these hills of home.
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Ruskin
The connection
