Ruskin Bond and the Art of Quiet Storytelling

“Have a cherry, Grandfather,” he said, as soon as he saw his grandfather in the garden. Grandfather took one cherry and Rakesh promptly ate the other two.

This was my introduction to you, sir. Standard 10 English class. The Cherry Tree. Read aloud by our excellent English teacher, who narrated the lessons with the right mix of emotion and instruction. I reckon once she retires from her current post as principal of the school, a second career as an audiobook narrator is waiting for her.

Why are these words etched in my memory, after three decades of leaving school? After all, she read the entire textbook to us. There were poems, stories, essays, moral lessons disguised as comprehension passages, and those questions at the end that seemed determined to drain all joy out of literature. So why this line? Why a boy offering his grandfather one cherry and eating the other two?

I think it is the simplicity of your writing. Your ability to take an everyday moment, and make it impactful, without the use of big words or complex sentences, is aspirational. Something I am clearly failing at, if you look at the sentence before.

There was no grand announcement in that moment. No heavy lesson. No dramatic turn. Just a child, a grandfather, a garden, and the tiny selfishness of childhood made funny instead of sinful.

That was what I noticed first, though I did not have the language for it then. I returned to your books much later, as an adult. That is how some writers stay with us. We do not always make a ceremony of going back to them. We simply find them waiting on a shelf, in a school memory, in a book bought for a child, in a story we thought we knew until we read it again with older eyes.

Over the years, I have read many of your books and stories. Tales of Fosterganj. The Night Train at Deoli. The Great Train Journey. Falling in Love Again. He Said It with Arsenic. Tigers for Dinner. Love stories. Train stories. Small-town stories. Mischievous family stories. Stories that are funny, tender, unsettling, and occasionally murderous.

I admire the way you move between genres so seemingly effortlessly. You do not seem restricted by category. A story may begin with a train station and become young love. A family memory may tilt towards mischief. A quiet hill road may suddenly hold danger. A small-town story may carry comedy, grief, loneliness, and odd affection in the same few pages. And yet, there is a Ruskin Bond quality to all of them.

I do not know how to define it exactly. Perhaps your readers would not want it defined too neatly either. It is there in the plainness of the sentence, the clarity of the observation, the fondness for odd people, the hills, the trains, the small shops, the lonely travellers, and the sudden appearance of danger in a perfectly ordinary setting.

You never seem to be in a hurry to impress the reader. You trust the hill road, the passing train, the small shop, the lonely traveller, the odd neighbour, the half-heard conversation. You trust that if a moment is seen clearly enough, it does not need to be inflated. That is what kept me with the stories. They felt easy to enter.

A child could read them and follow what was happening. An adult could return to them and find something quieter moving underneath. That is a rare kind of generosity in writing. The story does not close the door on either reader.

I picked up Tigers for Dinner: Tall Tales by Jim Corbett’s Khansama for my daughter, then ended up reading it myself first. This is the danger of buying books “for the children.” Sometimes the mother gets trapped before the child even reaches the first page.

I thought about this quality of recognition again while reading Tales of Fosterganj. I grew up in big cities, so that small-town world was not mine in any direct sense. The characters stand out because they are specific. They have habits, desires, disappointments, and small eccentricities. They are unique, and somehow also people you could find in every small town and neighbourhood. That is the strange power of well-written characters. They can belong to a place you have never lived in, and still remind you of someone you know.

For years, I think I was simply reading you. Only later did I realise I had also been learning. Not in the way one learns from a textbook, with definitions and underlined portions and answers at the back. I had enough of that in school, thank you very much.

I was learning by staying with the feeling your stories left behind. The more I write, the more I understand what I was absorbing without realising it. I was learning that simplicity is craft that has stopped showing off.

Your writing feels simple without ever feeling thin. That is not an easy thing to do. Simple writing is often mistaken for easy writing, perhaps because the reader does not see the struggle behind it. We see only the clean sentence. The ordinary word. The scene that moves without announcing that it is moving. As a reader, I enjoy that ease. As someone who calls herself a storyteller, I am in awe of it.

Because this is difficult to remember while writing. It is tempting to explain. To underline. To make sure the reader has understood every feeling exactly as intended. Your stories remind me that trust is part of craft too. Trust the reader. Trust the moment. Trust the cherry.

I was also learning that observation does not have to be cruel to be sharp. You notice people closely without turning them into specimens. You give them their oddness, their loneliness, their foolishness, their tenderness, and somehow they remain whole. That matters to me as a writer.

I am drawn to stories about ordinary life. The kind where the real drama is not always visible to the person living through it. The kind where a small incident, a familiar room, a casual sentence, or a half-forgotten memory can reveal more than a grand confession. Your stories have shown me again and again that ordinary does not mean empty.

A cherry tree growing quietly in a garden. A train stopping at a small station. A stranger seen once and remembered forever. A man in a small town with one peculiar habit. A child noticing something adults have stopped seeing. A conversation that says very little, but leaves something behind. These are not big bang moments. There are no dramatic entrances with thunder in the background. No one stands in the rain delivering a speech about the human condition. No one pauses the story to explain what life means. And yet, the moments stay with the reader. The emotions stay longer.

I think that is because your stories understand something that real life proves again and again. Most of what we remember does not arrive with background music. It arrives quietly. A sentence someone says casually. A look exchanged across a room. A habit. A kindness. A selfish little act that is so human we laugh before we judge. Like Rakesh giving his grandfather one cherry and eating the other two.

That detail works because it is specific. It is funny because it is true. Any adult who has spent time with children knows that exact generosity. The kind where love is sincere, but mathematics is flexible. That is the kind of detail I aspire to notice. The kind that does not need a paragraph explaining why it matters. The kind that lets the reader recognise life before the writer names it.

I have also learnt from your dialogue. People in your stories do not always speak in polished lines. They do not sound as if they have been waiting years for the writer to give them a profound sentence. They say small things. Ordinary things. Sometimes practical things. Sometimes silly things. Sometimes something that becomes meaningful only because of where it is placed.

That, to me, is one of the hardest lessons for a storyteller. Dialogue should sound easy. It should feel like someone simply opened their mouth and spoke. But anyone who has tried writing dialogue knows how quickly it can become stiff, clever, or unnatural. Real people do not speak in essays. They interrupt themselves. They avoid saying the real thing. They say too much about the weather and too little about what hurts. Your dialogues often carry that lived-in quality.

Writing is often described as a lonely journey. A career for the recluse, one might say. And yet, the most fantastic things seem to happen to you on the page. Young love appears at Deoli station. Uncle Bill may or may not want to poison someone. A khansama has tall tales to tell. A quiet hill road suddenly holds a mystery.

Of course, I know better than to assume every first-person story is a diary entry. You blend memory, imagination, observation, and fiction so naturally that the reader stops checking where one ends and the other begins. That, too, is part of the craft. As someone who writes from lived experience, I find this both admirable and mildly inconvenient. I have to actually live through things before I can write about them. You, meanwhile, seem able to sit quietly in the hills and still produce chance meetings, old secrets, lost travellers, haunted houses, overgrown paths, suspicious relatives, and inconvenient romance.

A writer may sit alone, but he is never really alone if he has been paying attention. Perhaps that is what I am trying to carry into my own storytelling. To look longer before I explain. To trust the small moment before I rush towards the big one. To let a sentence breathe without asking it to prove its importance too quickly.

When I first read The Cherry Tree, I remembered the cherries. Now, as an adult, I remember the patience. The seed planted without certainty. The waiting. The small disappointments. The wonder when something grows despite goats, grass-cutters, weather, and ordinary neglect.

Perhaps that is what your stories have taught me good storytelling does. It plants something quietly. Years later, someone remembers a line from a classroom, a boy in a garden, and a grandfather accepting one cherry while the child eats the other two. And suddenly, the story is still alive.

With gratitude,
Ankita