For Ruskin Bond, a busy railway station has often been the best place to find – and write – a story

Dehradun, in 1955, was still a small town with a population of roughly 50,000 souls. I say souls instead of people because each person I knew or met was a distinct individual with a soul of his or her own. It has now become difficult to separate one individual from another (not just in Dehra) as people seem to have merged into a certain similarity, all interested in the same things. Or is this feeling of mine just an old man being a little disgruntled with the present? Friendship seemed to mean something then, or perhaps it was just that we had more time for each other.

The British had left India, but I felt confident that the English language wasn’t going away. The Illustrated Weekly was still in the capable hands of CR Mandy. Most of my fiction appeared in that magazine. It was a productive period for me. Many of those stories still appear in collections and anthologies; “The Night Train at Deoli”, “The Eyes Have It”, “The Woman on Platform Eight”, “The Thief”, “The Crooked Tree” (probably my favourite), “Time Stops at Shamli”. And when The Room on the Roof finally appeared, it was serialised in the Illustrated Weekly, with Mario de Miranda’s evocative illustrations....

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