There was nothing bad about being an only child— we always had Ruskin Bond on the bookshelf. If you didn't have a view of the hills in a space-strapped city, he transported you to the north with his words. If you shied away from adventure, he'd tell you stories of how Toto, a monkey, jumps into a kettle. And if you intended on reading his work as one reads any other book i.e. from page 1 to x, he'd encourage you to read it backwards — that too in the foreword.

In 2017, Bond began penning down a series of memoirs. This weekend, on his birthday, he releases the final part of the trilogy titled Coming Round the Mountain (Puffin Books) — dwelling on his schooldays at Shimla's Bishop Cotton School, set in the year of Independence. Here, you meet Bond's best friends — The Fearsome Four, as they called themselves — Azhar Khan, Brian Adams and Cyrus Satralkar. But there's more than just mischief; the author absorbs you into his narrative and forces you to see India as it was through the eyes of a child, against the backdrop of war and in this case, the Partition. And Bond still excels at what he does best — constantly reminding you of everything that is good in the world.