The Hill of Enchantment review: At 90, Ruskin Bond takes us through a lifetime of writing

Why do we write? A difficult question to answer, given the efforts-to-rewards ratio of writing for an average writer. Especially so because most writers will tell you only too willingly, without much need for a prompt, about how torturous a thing it is to sit down, write, and then keep writing. Ruskin Bond, however, is by no measure an average writer. In The Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My Life as a Writer (Aleph), he attempts to take this bull of a question by its horns.

“I write,” he says, “because I can express myself better with the pen than with my faltering tongue. I write because I love words and what you can do with them. I write because I love this planet and all that’s beautiful upon it, and because I want to record my impressions of it. I write because I was born to write.” A good explanation from someone who has been writing for more than seven decades now. 

The book was released on May 19, as Bond turned 90, and it is best described as a loosely arranged account of his lifelong tryst with the written word. He describes it in the prologue himself as “the poem of all my days” and a poem is what it reads like with its recurring motifs of adventure, homecoming, and the dogged pursuit of a writing life.

The Adventure Wind

When I met Ruskin Bond in 2023, a month after his 89th birthday, one of the first things he asked me was whether I was holding a full-time job while I worked on my book. I take up jobs when I am running low on money, I told him, but I walk out of them again as soon as I have enough to resume my writing for some more time. I expect sensible advice from people when I tell them such things but, to my surprise, Bond emphatically approved of this rather wobbly way of living.

I would have known better to be surprised if I knew about his ‘adventure wind’ back then. It came to him for the very first time when he was at school in Shimla. “The wind came from the valley,” Bond writes, “and it entered my soul.” He felt stirred, and different, as if he “wanted to climb five mountains or swim seven seas”. Being restricted by the school boundary, he made do with writing his first poem, Listen!.

What was this adventure wind like?

Just a light breeze usually, he tells us, carrying with it the scent of pine needles and chestnut blossom. As a harbinger of adventure, however, it was not always so benign. During his stay in Jersey as a young man fresh out of school, Bond found himself stuck in a growing puddle of rejections and indifference from publishers. He was on the cusp of resigning himself to a humdrum future as an accounts clerk in the health department when his adventure wind came to his rescue.

This time it came as a gale from the sea while he strolled along St. Helier’s promenade and he found it difficult to stand against the wind’s force. It seemed angry, and wanted to punish him for being weak-spirited and defeatist, he thought. He honoured it by throwing up his job in Jersey and leaving for London to find a publisher for his first novel, The Room on the Roof (1956).

A Room of One’s Own

Spread across Bond’s life as a writer is a longing for some space of his own where he could write, and be himself, in peace. “A room of my own. That’s what I always wanted,” he says early in the book.

It could be a leaky room in a Dehradun bungalow the family was renting in 1948-49, or it could be a rooftop barsati he shared in 1950 with crows, mynas, squirrels, and (for one summer night only) a jackal. In Jersey, he had to share a room with one of his cousins, and the time he spent there comes across as one of the bleakest periods of his life. London provided him with lodgings in boarding houses, but it was, ‘an existence, not a life’. It was only when he returned to India that he found his own space again, and even then it took considerable time to settle down in the mountains for good. Essentially, the story of Bond’s writing life is the story of finding a home while going through a series of houses, cities, and jobs.

He moved into Ivy Cottage, his permanent home where he currently lives, when it was in a state of disrepair. Bond took solace, however, in the fact that there were 22 steps to the rooms—the exact number of steps he had climbed every day to his barsati in the 1950s. It’s also a good thing that in his room at Ivy Cottage, for many years Bond has enjoyed a window that shows him a panoramic view of the Himalayan landscape. He is, after all, a self-described connoisseur of windows who believes that ‘every window presents a different view of the human comedy.’

‘“No writer show be without a window,” Bond writes, “ No man or woman should be without a window. It is a requisite of both body and soul.”

This love for a view of the outside world is not surprising given his contributions to naturalist literature. I also believe, however, in a less literal explanation, and it has to do with Bond’s love for individual freedom that comes across not just in his writing but also in all his life decisions. Towards the end of this rather slim volume, while he is ruminating about not giving up easily on life, a firefly settles down on his windowsill. Someone else might have missed so little a thing, a younger person would probably have clicked a picture for their social media accounts, but Bond puts out the lights in his room and opens the window. His room is full of fireflies soon, they float there gently, and amuse the nonagenarian writer with their sweetness and light.

In Ruskin Bond’s writing life, it would seem, “writing” and “life” are intertwined so close together as to be interchangeable.