Book Excerpts: On this day in Landour, Ruskin Bond looks back

20 April

Early memories — Jamnagar in the 1930s. My father beating up a bowl of cream to make the delicious white butter that I still prefer to other butters.

Sorting stamps with him. He was an avid collector.

Crossing a dried-up lake on foot with my mother and being chased by a herd of buffaloes.

Panicking as I was about to be taken for a ride in a small biplane. Panicking as I was about to be taken for a trip in an Arab dhow. I was a nervous child.

Hated haircuts. Kicked and screamed. Had to be rolled up in a sheet so that the barber could cut my hair.

Stung by bees as I came down from the roof, disturbing their hive, which had been built into the stairs. Father bathed my inflamed arms and legs with a solution of potassium permanganate.

The old palace had a room at the top and coloured glass windowpanes. I loved looking through them. Many years later they went into my story ‘The Room of Many Colours’.

Balachadi beach. Collecting seashells. Paddling in the shallows.

Going to the pictures with my parents. English-language films came but seldom. But we saw ‘Tarzan the Ape Man’ (Johnny Weissmuller) and Noel Coward’s ‘Bitter Sweet’. These were the first films I saw.

My first book was a big book of nursery rhymes that included the poem about John Gilpin’s runaway horse, which was hilarious. Then a battered copy of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. And I loved comics — the funny ones.

Cosmos flowers grew rampant on the lawn. I wandered among them, imagining I was in a forest.

The ruler of the state (the ‘Jam Sahib’) gave us lots of toys at Christmas. I came last in a race organised for the children of the staff. Frogs everywhere during the rains. Snakes swallowing frogs. Saw a snake in the bathroom. It was thrown out by a servant, but I wouldn’t enter the bathroom for several days, preferring to remain constipated.

Attended a cricket match. (Jamnagar was famous for its cricket, being the state of Ranjitsinhji and Duleepsinhji.) Sweets were constantly passed around, and I did not pay any attention to the cricket.

We left Jamnagar in 1940, when I was six. World War II had broken out, and my father had joined the RAF. These memories came rushing back on a chilly April afternoon in Landour, after an interval of eighty years. Faces in the mist.

— Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins

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