Ruskin Bond is looking characteristically buoyant in a dapper red-and-black checked shirt, a saintly yet mischievous smile hanging loosely from the corner of his lips, his dreamy eyes focused on an imaginary plane far away. It suddenly strikes me that I’ve seen this expression before — it’s a look that seasoned story tellers often derive when they want to talk freely at length. Something already tells me this is going to be an anecdotal afternoon.

My hunch is not altogether unfounded. Employed in the business of story telling for some 57 years, Bond does have a lot to tell, on or off the pages. His latest literary offering, The Parrot Who Wouldn’t Talk and Other Stories, has just been put on the shelves by publishers Penguin. But while the 74-year-old is visibly excited about it, the fact remains that it’s only a small addition to the immense repertory of his work. “I think I’m one of the few Indian writers to have all my books still in print,” he says humbly, almost half embarrassed at the fact.

It’s a sunny winter afternoon in Delhi, and we are sitting in a heated room in the basement of a guesthouse in the southern quarters of the city. Bond comes across as any other regular septuagenarian, only sprier and more lively. A naturally articulate person, he talks in a crisp baritone, with frequent waves of his hands. And smiling comes easy to him.

I start with a rather dim-witted stock question. Tell me something about your past, I ask, knowing full well how stupid it is to expect someone to squeeze seven decades into the space of 70 minutes. Bond, however, seizes the opportunity before I can even apologise. “You sure want to listen,” he asks. I nod. And off he goes.

Born in 1934 to British parents in Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh, Bond grew up in several Indian towns. His parents were divorced, and when he was 10 he lost his airman father, an incident that pushed him “to near trauma.” “I was very attached to him,” he recalls.

Following his father’s death, he went to live with his mother — who had married a Punjabi by then — in Dehra Dun. There, in school, Bond’s keenness for writing began to develop. “My first story ended up in the dustbin,” he recalls jovially. Apparently, it was a satire on Bond’s teachers and, needless to say, found few admirers. “You’re wasting your time, Bond,” remarked the teacher who had confiscated it. The episode did little to salvage his reputation in school, which, he confesses, was already tarnished beyond reckoning by his below-average performance in studies. “I regularly failed maths,” he chuckles.

Soon, India gained Independence, and in the wake of the British departing India Bond’s mother thought it best to ship him off to England. “She thought I’d be entitled to a better future there,” says Bond. So at 17, he packed his bags and left on a one-way journey to England, with the idea of settling permanently, and never to return again.

“But the pull was impossible to get over,” says Bond of India. Homesickness had begun to mount, and in between odd jobs that he took up around his new residence in the Channel Islands, Bond sat at his desk writing about his childhood spent in India. That debut effort, titled The Room on the Roof, was picked up by publishers Andre Deutsch (later, it was to win him the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for literature), and Bond was handed £50 in advance. “I blew the money on a ticket back home,” says Bond. “The book brought me back.”

Once he’d returned to India, Bond took to freelancing. He moved up to the hills, “home territory” for him, and settled in Landour in Mussoorie in the 1960s, where he still lives with a local family that has adopted him. For the past few decades, his Uttaranchal home has literally been a room on the roof, which he initially took on rent, before buying it a few years ago. “Coincidentally, this one’s also 22 steps to the top, much like the room in my book,” he smiles.

Clearly, he is Mussoorie’s most famous resident, and few travellers who go up to the hill station come away without paying him a visit. “In fact, handling visitors at home got so hectic that I finally had to arrange with a local bookstore a few years ago to have a weekly session at their shop,” he says. These days, Bond walks down to the store once every week, where fans line up to get their books signed by him, and are occasionally treated to impromptu reading sessions by the author.

Truth be told, the mass adoration is not without reason. For there are few people in the English-speaking population in India today who can plead guilty of not having sampled Bond’s eloquent prose, much of which has been fodder for several school textbooks in the country through decades. I tell him about my personal initiation to his writing — Class V, The Tiger in the Tunnel, the first story in the year’s English rapid reader. “That’s it! You can’t escape me!” he guffaws.

Of course, Bond says he never started writing prose with the age of his audience in mind. “That’s something the publishers worry about. When I was young, I’d read Oliver Twist and then move on to Pride and Prejudice. In those days, you read pretty much everything you came across,” he says.

Similarly, his initial works were not written with an adolescent readership in mind. “Then, some school syllabus committees thought some of my stories were suited to children, so they put them into school readers,” says Bond. “Later, of course, I switched to writing for children for monetary reasons, because it was easier to get them published, especially abroad,” he says.

As one of India’s foremost full-time authors, Bond says the going has indeed been tough all along. “Writing is still a risky profession, you are nobody unless you have at least one good book behind you,” he observes. In the early years, he’d write stories to suit every kind of publication. His stories would appear in journals as far flung as those specialising in finance or defence strategy. “Together, they brought in about Rs 400 a month,” recalls Bond. “I’d give out Rs 30 as rent, Rs 100 to the dhaba man for food, and after other expenses have some money left over for the occasional beer,” he says.

Once in a while, extra money would come in from film adaptations of his works. “In 1979, Junoon got me Rs 10,000,” recalls Bond. “Overall, it was difficult, but I managed to stay afloat simply because I was too stubborn to let go.”

Things changed for the better when the publishing industry came of age in the 1990s. The royalties increased. “The sailing was smoother, but somehow the fun of old-school publishing had gone forever.”

Now a story tailored for Bollywood -— such as The Blue Umbrella for Vishal Bhardwaj — rakes in as much as Rs 1 lakh for the writer. “Vishal is now saying he’ll make a full-time film writer out of me,” laughs Bond. “I’m working on another couple of stories for him at the moment, sort of black comedies and mysteries. Although I must say I’m not too good at thrillers,” he admits sheepishly. “I’m too humane for it. If I write a thriller, I’ll probably end up sympathising with the murderer or something,” he grins.

Clearly, after a long journey, things are beginning to come full circle for Bond. Awards such as the Padma Shri and the Sahitya Akademi Prize have come and gone. Nonetheless, the romantic in him refuses to move ahead in time. A self-professed “impractical person, much like that Mr Bean fellow!,” he loves his daily overdose of sleep, his quiet evening walks in the hills of Landour, a visit from the mailman — “Nothing like a cheque from a publisher!” — or his weekly interactions with his admirers.

“I’m getting lazier by the day though,” confesses Bond. “But it’s important as a writer to maintain a strict daily routine, so I do put in my few hours at the desk every day. It’s what has kept me going all through.” An old-fashioned person, he still writes in long hand. “The typewriter gives me a bad case of stiff neck,” he says.

Suddenly, a knock on the door tells me my 70 minutes with the master storyteller are over. The stories obviously aren’t. We bid each other goodbye. “I hope we meet again sometime,” says Bond graciously. Sure, I say. At a bookstore in Mussoorie.