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104 pages

English

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The making of a writer Ruskin Bond's first full-fledged autobiographical book covers his -formative years,' till the age of twenty-one. The world of Anglo-India, with all its conflicting pulls, comes alive as he tells his story. His earliest memoirs are bitter-sweet, and relate to Jamnager where he lives till he is six. The happy hours spent in exploring the Ram Vilas Palace grounds and playing with his younger sister Ellen and the palace children are overshadowed by the acrimonious relation between his parents. Their estrangement while he is still a child leaves him with a life-long sense of insecurity. His unhappiness is exacerbated by the untimely death of his father " his emotional anchor when the author is just ten. Forced to stay with his mother and his stepfather, both of whom are absorbed in their own worlds, he tries to fend off his loneliness through books and the company of a few friends. Left for the most part to himself, the gentle dreamer realizes very early as -a pimply adolescent' his calling as a writer. His first book, The Room on the Roof, materializes in England, the land of his forefathers, where he is sent to make a career for himself. Despite the unexpected success of his novel, which wins a major British literary prize, the author's yearning for India is too powerful to let him remain abroad for long. He returns and begins a writing career which has spanned four decades, and earned him a place in the pantheon of great Indian writers.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184754506
Langue	English

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Ruskin Bond
Scenes from a Writer s Life

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
Preamble, Prelude, Prologue
Chapter One: Life with Father
Chapter Two: Simla and Delhi, 1943
Chapter Three: My Father s Last Letter
Chapter Four: Mother and Stepfather
Chapter Five: Dehra Dun-Winter of 45
Chapter Six: The Playing Fields of Simla
Chapter Seven: Reading was My Religion
Chapter Eight: A Walking Person
Chapter Nine: The Young Rebel
Chapter Ten: Hold on to Your Dreams
Interlude: The Pure, the Bright, the Beautiful From My Journal, 1951
Chapter Eleven: A Far Cry from India
Chapter Twelve: Three Jobs in Jersey
Chapter Thirteen: And Another in London
Chapter Fourteen: Return to Dehra
Illustrations
Notes and Letters
Footnotes
Chapter One
Chapter Nine
Chapter Thirteen
Interlude: The Pure, the Bright, the Beautiful
Notes and Letters
Envoi
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS SCENES FROM A WRITER S LIFE
Ruskin Bond was born in Kasauli in 1934, and grew up in Jamnagar, Dehra Dun and Simla. In the course of a writing career spanning four decades, he has written over a hundred short stories, essays and novels and more than thirty books for children. He has also edited three anthologies for Penguin Books.
His first novel, The Room on the Roof , written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. In 1992, for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra , he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India. In 1995, Penguin Books published The Complete Stories and Novels , making him one of ten authors to be so honoured, A 26-episode serial based on his short stories was recently telecast by Doordarshan. Scenes from a Writer s Life is his first full-fledged memoir, recounting his formative years.
Ruskin Bond lives in Mussoorie.
Other Penguin books by Ruskin Bond
Fiction The Complete Stories and Novels Delhi is Not Far: The Best of Ruskin Bond Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories The Room on the Roof/Vagrants in the Valley Time Stops at Shamli and Other Stories Strangers in the Night: Two Novellas Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra
Non-Fiction Rain in the Mountains
For Children Panther s Moon The Room on the Roof
Anthologies edited by Ruskin Bond Penguin Book of Classical Indian Love Stories and Lyrics Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories
For you, my gentle reader
Preamble, Prelude, Prologue
Few people bother to read Forewords, Introductions, or Prefaces, and I can t say I blame them. The very names are off-putting. Like speeches they are best left to die away on the wind, for in cold print all that fine rhetoric looks uninviting and indigestible. I don t know of anyone who reads volumes of speeches, and I have yet to meet someone who has read the Introductions to the world s classics. So why read mine?
I shall be crafty and call it something else.
The reader may be surprised to know that this is the first time I am attempting straight autobiography. True, the autobiographical element is present in much of my work, but there is really more fiction in my fiction than the reader may realize. That dramatic escape from Java, those supernatural experiences, and the close encounters with bears, leopards and amorous pythons have a certain verisimilitude because I have used the first person and taken the trouble to make the backgrounds and episodes convincing. I m no Baron Munchausen, but sometimes I have given rein to my imagination, although in a perfectly credible way.
According to my mother, my grandfather did keep a number of interesting pets, and I have described them and their activities in some of my tales. But I have not tried to emulate him in this respect. Visitors to my small flat in Mussoorie are sometimes disappointed to find that there are no flying foxes hanging from the ceiling or white mice peeping out from under the cushions. Mukesh (a member of my family) did on one occasion bring home a guinea pig, and we kept it for a few days. But guinea pigs, like their relatives, the rabbits, evacuate their food as rapidly as they consume it (which is all day) and cleaning up the mess is a full-time job. We gave the guinea pig to one of the many NGOs that has sprung up on the hillside. They were looking for a fund-raising mascot.
I love animals but their bowel movements are somewhat different from ours, and they were never meant to live in an author s bedroom, library or clothes cupboard. Their true home is in the wild, where they can enrich the soil rather than the carpet.
So the reader who comes to this book looking for my fictional persona will be disappointed. I am not an eccentric recluse who converses with rhesus monkeys. I do not care for rhesus monkeys. They invade my rooms, wreck the telephone, raid the kitchen and fling my geraniums out of the window. No, I am like any other normal human being who pays his taxes and curses when the lights go out.

The first twenty-one years of my life form the period covered by this memoir. Although, for most of us, these are not years of great achievement, they are the formative years, and the most emotional, impressionable, vulnerable years. There are struggles, setbacks, failures, but hope and optimism have not been blighted, and the cynicism of middle age is yet far distant.
I was still a pimply adolescent when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I had read Dickens David Copperfield and Hugh Walpole s Fortitude and decided that I wanted to be like the writer-heroes of both books. Before that, my father had brought me up on a diet of the children s classics as well as other forms of entertainment, and although I was only ten when he died, the seed had been sown and I had begun to dream. The ensuing lonely period with my mother and stepfather only cemented my attachment to the world of books. They were the great escape. And as I grew out of my teens I began to love the country that I had, till then, taken for granted-to love it through the friends I made and through the mountains, valleys, fields and forests which had made an indelible impression on my mind (for India is an atmosphere as much as it is a land)-with the result that, no sooner had I set foot in the West, than I wanted to return to India and to all that I had known and loved.
It was only by going away that I came to the realization that I would never go away again, no matter what happened. This was where I belonged and this was where I would stay, come flood or fury.
So this is the story of two journeys-one, to the point where I had found a publisher for my first book and could confidently say, I am an author ; and the other, to the point where I had resolved most of my inner conflicts and could confidently say, I am an Indian -in the broadest, all-embracing, all-Indian sense of the word.
Being a child of changing times, I had grown up with divided loyalties; but at the end of the journey I had come to realize that I was blessed with a double inheritance. And I was determined to make the most of it.
If it were not for the family that has grown up around me, making me a prisoner of love, I doubt if I would have remained rooted to one place for so long-Mussoorie and its surroundings.
In 1970 there came Prem and his young wife. Then their children, Rakesh, Mukesh and Savitri. Rakesh grew up and married, and he and Beena presented us with two delightful youngsters-Siddharth and Shrishti. So there is no escape. I have become a family man by virtue of remaining a bachelor. In many ways, this is the ideal situation for a writer. All the noise, merriment and bedlam of a large family living together has become an integral part of my own life, and for the most part it s joy to my heart and music to my ears.
And for me, it makes up for the lonely childhood years when I felt distanced from family and could find happiness only in the homes of friends or between the covers of books.
The painful but sometimes pleasurable process of growing up and becoming a writer is described in these pages.
Ruskin Bond
Chapter One

Life with Father
During my childhood and early boyhood with my father, we were never in one house or dwelling for very long. I think the Tennis Bungalow in Jamnagar (in the grounds of the Ram Vilas Palace) housed us for a couple of years, and that was probably the longest period.
In Jamnagar itself we had at least three abodes-a rambling, leaking old colonial mansion called Cambridge House ; a wing of an old palace, the Lal Bagh I think it was called, which was also inhabited by bats and cobras; and the aforementioned Tennis Bungalow, a converted sports pavilion which was really quite bright and airy.
I think my father rather enjoyed changing houses, setting up home in completely different surroundings. He loved rearranging rooms too, so that this month s sitting room became next month s bedroom, and so on; furniture would also be moved around quite frequently, somewhat to my mother s irritation, for she liked having things in their familiar places. She had grown up in one abode (her father s Dehra house) whereas my father hadn t remained anywhere for very long. Sometimes he spoke of making a home in Scotland, beside Loch Lomond, but it was only a distant dream.
The only real stability was represented by his stamp collection, and this he carried around in a large tin trunk, for it was an extensive and valuable collection-there was an album for each country he specialized in: Greece, Newfoundland, British possessions in the Pacific, Borneo, Zanzibar, Sierra Leone; these were some of the lands whose stamps he favoured most . . .
I did share some of his enthusiasm for stamps, and they gave me a strong foundation in geography and political history, for he went to the trouble of telling me something about the places and people depicted on them-that Pitcairn Island was inhabited largely by mutineers from H.M.S.Bounty; that th