‘The trees and the birdsong were urging me to risk happiness’: Ruskin Bond writes about spring
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I was thirty, and it was spring, when my life changed: this Magic Mountain became my home.
I had been living in Delhi for over two years, writing publicity briefs for the international relief agency CARE, and not at all happy doing it. If I was going to write reams of self-congratulatory hand-outs, I told myself, I might as well be doing my own writing, even if it meant a drop in my income. Early in the April of 1963, I was sent to Mussoorie to write about CARE’s Tibetan relief programme, especially for the refugee children. Their education was being sponsored at the Wynberg Allen School, where I was to meet the principal, and he asked me to lunch. He had also invited an old lady, Miss Bean. She lived alone in a cottage below the school, and the teachers were kind to her because she had very little money. The principal had told me, before she arrived, that she had lost all her property and had no relatives.
Miss Bean was 86 and slightly built. She looked fragile but was surprisingly sprightly. She told me she had lived in Mussoorie all her adult life, and though she’d had to sell...