‘Your handwriting is good. You can be a clerk to a lawyer’, that’s all a mother laughingly told her son when he expressed his desire to become a writer. After that the boy stopped discussing his desire. He wished to write short stories and become a writer but none in his family was either supportive or even liked it a good idea. His stepfather wanted him to continue education and pursue for a college degree. His mother advised him to join the Army and his school teacher wished him to become a teacher. He is none other than Ruskin Bond.
Ruskin Bond wished to become a writer
Ruskin’s first novel, ‘The Room on the Roof’ bagged the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Bond was only 17 at that time. Since then he has written over 500 short stories, essays and novellas. In addition to that, more than 40 children books also came from his pen.
As a child, all those thoughts would really terrify Mr. Bond. “A teacher! That was the last thing I wanted to be; I’d had enough of school rules, homework and early morning PT. And I had no wish to inflict it on others. The Army? More rules, more PT, heavy boots, routine marching…” he would think as such about all those ideas floated by his guardians and teacher.
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When Bond was eight years old, his mother separated from his father. Edith Clarke then married a Punjabi Hindu, Hari. Ruskin was very close to his father, Aubrey Alexander Bond. Aubrey arranged for Ruskin to be brought to New Delhi because he was working for Royal Air Force. Bond describes this period with his father as one of the happiest times of his life.
His parents got separated when Ruskin was just eight years old
At early age, he couldn’t afford to buy books. But thanks to a lending library, he could borrow as many books he liked for two rupees. Thus he was able to read quite a few popular fiction writers. This way he read P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Somerset Maugham, James Hilton and others.
“Sometimes, my stepfather would also give me a rupee or two, but I was anxious to supplement my income on my own, and the only way I could do this was by putting my literary talents to practical use,” he recalls. So he began to use his stepfather’s old typewriter and would send stories to magazines and newspapers all over the country.
Ruskin got five rupees for his first printed stories in a Madras little magazine
“Then, finally, a little magazine in Madras called ‘My Magazine of India’, accepted one of them and paid me by money order the princely sum of five rupees! After that, I bombarded the magazine with everything I wrote, and, to my delight, the five-rupee money orders kept coming in,” That he wrote in his latest book “A Song of India: The Year I Went Away“.
This May he turned 86 who now lives in Mussoorie with his extended family. A Song of India” is the fourth book in the memoir series by Mr. Bond published by Puffin. Set in 1951, it is the story of the beginning of Bond’s writing journey. In this book, Mr. Bond takes the reader back to his last days in Dehradun, before he set sail for England, the year that later became the basis for his first novel, “The Room on the Roof“. The illustrated book also marks the 70th year of Mr. Bond’s writings.
He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993, the Padma Shri in 1999, and the Delhi government’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.
