Renowned writer Ruskin Bond has become synonymous with the Doon valley and Mussoorie as he has spent many long years in this region. Most of jos works talk about Doon and Mussoorie , especially Landour (Old Mussoorie) where he has been living since 1963.
However, there is another hill station, now in Himachal Pradesh, which has an important role in shaping his literary life and personality. When Bond was born in Kasauli in 1934, the town was in Punjab in colonial India. And when he studied at Bishop Cotton School in Shimla, it was again in the years when Shimla was in Punjab. However, today Himachal Pradesh takes pride in the fact that the great writer was born in this region and also did his schooling here.
I was at this famous hill station of Himachal Pradesh, its capital, recently for a literary event.
While I was talking to young students about Bond’s relationship with the hills and dales of Shimla, I realised that the manner in which his years there would have influenced him would have been indeed special.
I spoke to the writer about this and came to know about his days at Bishop Cotton School. “As a school boy at Simla’s Bishop Cotton School, I was made incharge of the Anderson Library there for my last two years in school.
This library contributed greatly to my love for reading and writing. I would allow myself to be transported to another world through the pages of Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole ,J.B.Priestley ,P.G.Wodehouse , J.M.Barrie,Compton Mackenzie,Dornford Yates and other successful novelists ,poets and playwrights of the 1930s and 40s,” said Bond while recalling those years.
“Another time that I was brought a trolley of books when I was down with jaundice in 1949 at school and was taken to Simla’s Ripon Hospital .It was a kind matron who, in a way, introduced me to O.Henry, Saqi and Barry Pain.
It was at Shimla that he read through a large number of books between the years 1947 and 1950 till he completed his schooling and came back to the Doon valley.”I think it would be fair to say that when I was a boy ,reading was my religion .
It helped me to discover my soul”, Bond says. In his book Confessions of a Book Lover he takes us into his inner world and gives us an insight into his childhood and adolescence when he developed a close relationship with the world of literature.
His earliest encounters with some of his favourite writers have been brought to us in this work which is a sort of sequel to his earlier Love among the Bookshelves .
He gives us a prelude before sharing with us some excerpt or chapter from the writings of the authors whom he has loved all his life. “These writers were important to me at various stages of my personal and writing life,” he says in his introduction to the book .
Talking to this correspondent ,he has often said that reading has always been a minority pastime. “When I was in school, out of 35 boys in my class, just three or four were readers.
Those days, the minority was in hundreds –now it may be in lakhs”, he says.By now, most of us know from Bond’s writings that he has been a great fan of Charles Dickens , especially David Copperfield with which he could identify himself easily .
Here he tells us that Nicholas Nickleby was also his favourite –“full of humor,pathos and memorable scenes”.It was in the winter of 1948 -49 that Bond, still a school boy, discovered Dickens in an old cupboard in Dehradun.
And indeed it is a great coincidence that Mussoorie, that has been Bond’s home for decades now, has a connection with Dickens as John Lang was a correspondent for Dickens’ Household Words while he(lang) lived in Mussoorie.
When Bond first visited Bengaluru in 1960, he came across the Select Bookshop of KBK Rao at MG Road ( now it is on Brigade Road) . He became friends with Rao and later with his son KKS Murthy who , even now, sends him handwritten lists of books that he thinks would interest Bond. The books keep piling up in his room and study at Ivy Cottage!
Bond says that he loves to discover “the unusual ,the little-known ,the forgotten , and even the eccentric…sometimes a little gem turns up or a neglected masterpiece”.
And he discovered many such gems at Bishop Cotton library in Shimla!He has written about his school friends in Shimla and fondly remembered them in many of his works.His bond with the Himalayas began in the Doon valley as well as during his years at Shimla.