A Song of India

Beginning of a Literary Journey

With his latest in his series of boyhood memoirs, Ruskin Bond completes seven decades of his writing journey. 

Having given generations of readers life-long friends and companions with his characters and stories - A Song of India takes us back to the very beginning of his writing journey. 

Here's a glimpse in the excerpt below!

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I could not afford to buy books, but one of the older bookshops had a lending library made up of old and shopworn stock, and for two rupees a month I could borrow as many books as I liked. In this way, I got through a lot of popular fiction— P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Dornford Yates (forgotten now), W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, James Hilton, Henry De Vere Stacpoole and other bestselling authors of the period. I was already well grounded in the classics, thanks to my school library, and at home I had the books I'd won as school prizes—the complete works of Shakespeare, a biography of Dickens, several volumes of Stevenson, Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson and Wuthering Heights (a favourite of mine).

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.

There was an old typewriter lying unused in my stepfather's showroom, so I brought it home and began writing very short stories and literary sketches. I preferred writing by hand, but in those days you had to submit typescripts to editors or your work would not be considered.

Well, I would send my stories and skits to magazines and newspapers all over the country, and they would keep coming back with polite little rejection slips. Then, finally, a little magazine in Madras (now Chennai), 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. I could watch more films, even buy the occasional magazine like The Strand with its short stories or Picturegoer with its news of the latest films, both of which were published in England.

My constant companion in those early days was Bhim, the son of the local eye surgeon. He was a couple of years younger than me, and he wanted to improve his English. Someone told him, 'If you stick with that angrez, Bond, you will be sure to improve your English!' He was a smart boy, and he took this advice. He would turn up at odd times and get me to help him with his school essays, grammar, poetry, etc. At first, I found it all very irritating, but after some time, I got used to his presence, and from being familiar, we became friends. Sometimes, he would accompany me to the cinema, and although he preferred Hindi films—dragging me along to see Nimmi or Dilip Kumar in their latest hit—he would be happy to join me in watching the slapstick comedies of Laurel and Hardy, which would come around regularly, even though the duo had retired from films by then.

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