This is an imaginary interview with Ruskin Bond

This eminent person gave me this interview at a hotel named Hotel Ellora.

Interviewer : How are you?

Ruskind Bond : How do you do?

I : Well. Nice to meet you.

Ruskind Bond : Also.

I : What is the first thing you ever got published?

Ruskind Bond : I was 16 when The Illustrated Weekly of India published my first story soon
after I left school. It was a funny story about one of my teachers. They didnt like it back in
school.
I : Going back from there, tell me about your parents.

Ruskind Bond : My father was born in Shahjahanpur, UP, the son of a soldier. He met my
when he was on leave from his job in Mussoorie. When I was six or seven my parents
separated. Somehow they were incompatible. There was a great deal of differences in their ages
and maybe in their interests.

I : Were you very close to your father??

Ruskind Bond : Yes, especially during those World War II years. For two or three years, I
was actually with my father, most of the time in New Delhi. He was very devoted to me and
gave me all his spare time. He introduced me to books and films. My father did a number of
interesting things in his not very long life. He set up a schoolroom for palace children in
Jamnagar, managed a tea estate in Munnar, Kerala. During the War, he was in the Royal Air
Force. In 1944, towards the end of the war, he died in Kolkata of severe hepatitis. I was ten
years old then.
I : Couldnt you go to his funeral?

Ruskind Bond : I was told about his death in school. Reality doesnt always sink in if you are
not present when someone dies. There is no closure. It was a traumatic experience and I think
for two or three years I became reclusive. Books were my favourite companions.

I : How did you do in studies?

Ruskind Bond : I was okay. I was good in English and history but terrible in maths. I read a
lot of books in the school library. I didnt go to college. You could say I was self-taught.

I : Did it take long for your first novel, The Room on the Roof, to get published?

Ruskind Bond : Yes, a couple of years. On my mothers suggestion, I went to England when
I was 17. While living in Jersey in the Channel Islands, I took up various jobs. I worked with
a travel agency, a grocery store, and the public health department. During this time, I was also
writing my first novel, which was based on my journal. I would do the writing when I came
home in the evenings. The publisher, Andr Deutsch, made me wait a bit. I was impatient and
asked them to send my book back, but they didnt. I was back in India when the novel got
published.

I : What made you return to India?

Ruskind Bond : I was missing friends. I came back purely for emotional reasons and not to
become a famous writer. People who wanted to become famous writers were leaving India and
going to England.

I : Didnt it harm your writing career?

Ruskind Bond : I could have ended up becoming a babu in a school or something like that.
But I would turn out at least four or five stories and articles every month and bombard all the
magazines and newspapers in the country. In those days newspapers had literary sections like
fiction or essays and would pay modest sums.

I : You were making a modest living out of freelancing. Werent you tempted to
take up a full-time job?

Ruskind Bond : Well, I did briefly take up jobs. I worked with CARE, the relief organization,
for\some three years. In the Seventies, I was a sort of literary editor of Imprint magazine
published from Bombay. I edited it from Mussoorie for about three years. It got a little
monotonous so I gave it up. I wanted to just concentrate on my writing.

I : You never married.

Ruskind Bond : I wanted to on two or three occasions but it didnt take place. In London, I
fell in love with a girl from Vietnam. In those days there was a fashion to tell fortunes from tea
leaves as they settled in the bottom of the cup. When I asked her to marry me, she looked inside
her cup and said the leaves say we cant get married. That was her way of saying sorry. When
I was in my 20s, I wanted to marry every pretty girl I encountered. Then I realized that I
couldnt marry all of them so better to marry none. In my 40s,"I had a lonely childhood. It
helped me to understand children who had problems. Childhood memories are the most vivid."
I grew out of it. I am not the marrying kind, so no regrets on that score.

I : What made you settle down in Mussoorie?

Ruskind Bond : It was cheap, it was quiet. I lived on the outskirts, near the forest, where I
could write without interruption. I have written many of my best stories there.

I : All your life, you havent been particularly drawn towards money. Whats your
outlook towards it?

Ruskind Bond : Id be writing even if I wasnt making money. Writing to me is compulsion,

money is secondary.
I : You have written a lot for children. What fascinates you about childhood?

Ruskind Bond : After my father passed away, I had a lonely childhood. It helped me to
understand children who had problems. Childhood memories are visual memories. We
remember them most vividly.

I : Does a writers painful childhood have any bearing on his writings?

Ruskind Bond : Look at other writers, say Dickens, who also grew up in a disrupted family.
His father was in jail for debt and he didnt even finish school. So there were other writers who
had unsettled childhoods. It leads to a certain sensitivity, which gets translated into their
writings.

I : Earlier, newspapers and magazines published short stories. But most publications
have stopped carrying them now.

Ruskind Bond : It has harmed the short story. Earlier, several short story writers like Chekhov
and Maupassant seldom wrote novels but now writers are forced to write novels. Historically,
publishers have been wary of short story collections unless they are written by well-known
authors. I have written a few short novels but I think the best-selling books are probably my
short story collections. Its a different medium, and certainly I prefer it.

I : Isnt a short story like a compressed novel?

Ruskind Bond : A short story is a slice of life; its an insight into a character. In a novel, you
are very often covering a period of time. The characters are changing over a period of time,
whereas in a short story you are going into an immediate moment.

I : You have written many short novelsnovellas, as they are often called. With
decreasing attention spans, do you think novellas could be more popular now?

Ruskind Bond : They can be but publishers prefer a full-length novel. They have to spend
almost as much money on printing a short book as they would on a long one. The reader also
feels he is getting his moneys worth. I think you can say all that you want to say with a shorter
work.

I : How will you describe your style of writing?

Ruskind Bond : It is an easy conversational style, the way I am talking to myself. That is why
I use the first person quite a lot. It makes it more personal in a way. I dont think my style has
changed a great deal over the years. If anything, it flows better now.

I : Three of your stories were adapted into films.

Ruskind Bond : That just happened by chance. In the case of A Flight of Pigeons, Ismat

made Junoon in 1978]. Later Vishal Bhardwaj made The Blue Umbrella into a film. His wife
had read it and told him that it would make a good film. Later when he wanted to make a film
based on Susannas Seven Husbands, he asked me to lengthen the story, which I did keeping
in mind the films possibilities. Then he based his script on it and made 7 Khoon Maaf.

I : Do you think reading is declining in this digital age?

Ruskind Bond : We keep blaming these diversions but there are a lot of people who enjoy
reading, though its always been a minority pastime. I keep saying this because even if I go
back to my schooldays when there was no television, no internet,

there were only two or three of us in my class who were interested in reading. That [reading]
minority has now grown into hundreds of thousands.

I : What are the benefits of reading?

Ruskind Bond : It makes one understand life better, be philosophical about it. Take the ups
and downs of life more easily because if you are reading good booksI am talking about
fictionyou learn so much about human nature and the difficulties that people might
encounter. It helps you to be more sensitive to others.

I : Any unfulfilled ambitions?

Ruskind Bond : Id have liked to be a better writer. One cant be perfect, but you can aim for
it. People often tell me that if I had stayed on in England, I could have made a fortune. But I
am not sure. I would have stayed on working in that grocery store [laughs]. I think coming back
to India did me good. The things I wanted to write about were here. I would have also liked to
have a large garden where I could grow all kinds of flowers and plants.

I : Lots of thanks for the interview.

Ruskind Bond : Welcome.