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What is it about Ruskin Bond? It’s not just the stories he writes. He unlocks a wooden door in your memory. They hold your hand and walk you back to school corridors, to friends whose names you hadn’t said aloud in years, to a time when joy was as simple as a toffee and a bicycle race. That is his magic. As the author turns 92 today, he celebrated his birthday by launching a new book titled All-Time Favourite Friendship Stories.

Bond turns his gentle gaze towards one of life’s most cherished gifts and that is friendship. In an exclusive chat with Khaleej Times, we caught up with the most loved author to talk about his childhood pals, fond memories and how the book on friendship came about.

Talking about what friendship means to him, he says, “My entire life has been woven around the strong bonds of friendship that have grown around me. Friends have often become family, and for me these close relationships have helped me to see life. Shrishti and Siddharth, Rakesh and Beena and others have all grown up in front of me, and family means friendship and friendship means family. Love embraces us all.”

Bond’s latest book is not the first story he has written on the subject. Thick as Thieves: Tales of Friendship, The Room on the Roof and Vagrants in the Valley, Friends of My Youth and A Little Book of Friendship are all stories woven around bonds, friendships and camaraderie. For him, his friends played a big part in how he sees friendship today.

“A lot of my school friends and friends of my boyhood certainly appear in my stories. Even though we haven’t seen each other in a long time but they live in my stories. The first person who published my work which was The Room on the Roof was my editor Diana Athill, who was 10 years older than me. She saw I was down and out and I didn’t have much money. She came to my rescue. The first thing she did was give me an overcoat in London winters and that led to our friendship. We spent a lot of time and talked about books and publishing. That was great help to me. We would go sometimes to the movies. It was an important friendship. It was not a romance or love affair. It was a genuine friendship. When two people have similar interest, it’s easy for them to become friends. Books were our common ground. We liked each other’s company,” he recalls.

He remembers taking Diana to an Indian restaurant and “she had difficulty eating paan which was rare to get in London during those days.”

The writer has beautiful memories to share and it reflects in his storytelling too. Suddenly you’re eight again, barefoot on warm deodar needles, sharing raw mangoes with salt, laughing till your stomach hurts. His words smell of old books and first monsoon rain. Talking about a fond childhood memory, he recalls, “The first six years of my life were spent in Jamnagar (now Gujarat). My father ran a small palace school. I have vivid and fond memories of the palace children. Some of the royals, one of whom became the central character in my book The Room of Many Colours, one of my most memorable stories.”

Describing himself as a loner, Ruskin Bond feels solitude and loneliness fuel his writing process. “I lived in Mussoorie on my own for some time when I was in my 30s and 40s. In Landour, I always had my family with me. Solitude has always been a part of my life. I was a lonely boy, partly because my parents had separated. I had some difficulty adjusting to my stepfather and different kind of life. I was always a reflective boy. I used to take long walks. I still did till few years ago. I liked to take lonely walks into the hills, into the countryside. Like Wordsworth, they gave me fodder for my stories and poems.”

His latest book, published by Puffin Books, is a collection featuring 22 stories drawn from across Ruskin Bond’s extraordinary body of work including a few brand-new stories. We asked him about a key takeaway for his readers from this book and in fact from all his lovely works. Here’s what he had to say about it. “It will be the joy of finding (in another person) a happy and loving response towards all feelings. Friendship is all about two souls discovering each other and creating a bond which often lasts a lifetime,” he signs off.

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