Nature, Memory, and
the Speaking Landscape in The Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My Life as
a Writerby Ruskin Bond
Puneet
Kour,
PhD Research Scholar,
Department of English and Cultural Studies,
Panjab University,
Chandigarh, India.
Abstract: Reading Ruskin
Bond is like opening a window to mist, to birdsong, to wind, and to a sky in
motion. In The Hill of Enchantment:
The Story of My Life as a Writer, Bond does not merely narrate a life;
he reminisces of a landscape. Trees, clouds, winds, and birds make occasional
presence, not as symbols, but as friends, companions, even co-partners of his
journey. This research paper examines how Bond, through his personification of
the natural world and the recurring natural motif, weaves an ethic of
ecological kinship grounded in memory and a tranquil joy. It draws from
ecocritical thought and previous research into the author’s environmental
sensibility, and argues that this latest autobiographical work demonstrates his
longstanding ecocritical worldview. Here, the world is not merely observed, it
is felt, lamented, spoken to, and occasionally even speaks back. In a time of
ecological destruction and hurried disengagement, a slower, more enchanted
manner of living that honors the quiet after the storm and listens for the
voice in the wind is what Ruskin Bond’s writing reminds us of.
Keywords:
Landscape, Nature, Ecological destruction, Environment, Memory, Ecocriticism.
Introduction
In Ruskin Bond’s world, nature is never still. It hums,
it sighs, it startles, and it speaks. Across his many works, including in his
2023 autobiographical reflection The Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My
Life as a Writer, nature does not simply serve as setting, but becomes a
witness and a co-dweller. Trees are old friends. The wind is an adventurer and
a spiritual associate. A jungle crow taps on his window and leaves with a piece
of toast (74). Labeling this mere romanticism would be a mistake. There is
something more grounded, enchanted, and, at times, grieving, in the way the
writer tunes in to the sound of the world. This paper looks at The Hill of
Enchantment as an intimate ecological document. It attempts to understand
how Bond constructs a life not divorced from nature but folded into it, one
where birds, breezes, gardens, and hills are not metaphors, but they are
presences. This places his autobiographical style within a larger framework of ecocriticism, posthumanism, and a passing reference to what Glenn Albrecht has
called “solastalgia” – the pain
of losing one’s home environment while still living in it (Albrecht 10–11). Where most memoirs look inward,
this looks outward through a literal and symbolic “window”, toward changing
skies, fleeing birds, and the quiet memory of a lost stream (ix).Read through
this lens, the memoir fits Lawrence Buell’s account of environmentally oriented
literature, in which the nonhuman appears as an active presence rather than
backdrop, where human interests are not the only interests at stake, but an
ethical relation to the place is foregrounded, and where environment is
rendered as process rather than scenery (The Environmental Imagination7–8).
Ruskin Bond has long been recognized for his deep, tender
portrayals of nature. His earlier works likeRain in the Mountains, Roads to Mussoorie, Our Trees Still
Grow in Dehra, and the others,
have been discussed in the context of environmental writing in India. As Renu
observes in her 2024 article on Bond’s ecology, “For Bond, nature is not a passive backdrop to human activity but an
active and living presence that shapes the lives of his characters. His
descriptions of the natural world often carry a romantic sensibility,
celebrating the beauty and vitality of landscapes, plants, and animals. At the
same time, Bond’s works subtly reflect an environmental consciousness that
anticipates the ecological challenges of the modern world” (145). In The
Hill of Enchantment, the reciprocity is remembered in fragments: a praying
mantis on a leaf, a bat who became a poem, a jackal howling at the window, and
a wild garden that grew into an insect sanctuary. However, this book is not
only a celebration of nature’s presence. It is also a document of its absence and its slow departure in the
sound of dynamite blasts, in the disappearance of birds from the hillside, and
in the cutting down of oaks and walnuts to make way for roads (The Hill of Enchantment 55). The grief
is not loud or rhetorical, but is personal, and all the more powerful for its
quietness. Bond does not preach, but mourns. Moreover, in doing so, he offers
readers a subtle ecological ethics, one rooted in memory, enchantment, and the
enduring dignity of living alongside the nonhuman world. The study that follows
reads The Hill of Enchantment through three key lenses: first, the motif of the window as an interface
between the self and the world; second, the
personification of natural elements as a form of posthuman kinship; and
third, ecological memory and loss,
where recollection becomes a form of resistance. Using ecocritical theory
(Buell, Albrecht)and Bond’s own earlier writings, the paper situates The
Hill of Enchantment not just as memoir, but as ecopoetic testament, and asa quiet argument for attention and
enchantment in a world slipping into noise.
The Window as Threshold: Writing, Seeing, Being
“No writer should be without a window. No man or woman
should be without a window. It is a requisite of both body and soul.” – Ruskin Bond, The Hill of Enchantment (73)
Ruskin Bond’s memoir, The Hill of Enchantment,
begins, as Bond so often does, with a view from a window. The window is not
merely an opening in a wall. It is a recurring metaphor, a space of witnessing,
and a quiet companion to a writer who has lived most of his life looking out
over valleys and skies, brought to the fore by his own admission, “I have only to open my window to see a
magical world—clouds racing
across the sky, mountains marching into the distance…”(Bond ix). For
Bond, the window is not a way to escape the world, but to enter it. What
unfolds beyond the sill is alive: a crow that knocks and leaves with toast,
clouds that pass like thoughts, and hills that hold memory. Bond refers to the
crow who still visits, long after traffic has driven the others away as a
longtime friend (74). The window, then, becomes a threshold between the inner self and the outer world, a site where
writing, remembering, and being coalesce. In Roads to Mussoorie, he
wrote, “Some night sounds outside my
window remain strange & mysterious. Perhaps they are the sounds of the
trees themselves, stretching their limbs in the dark, shifting a little,
flexing their fingers, whispering to one another”
(Bond, Roads to Mussoorie n.p.). The window is a steady motif, a
living frame that lets the world in – trees, wind, snow, birdsong – and lets
the writer out, into language.
The phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics
of Space, emphasizes that intimate spaces can open onto infinity – not
through literal size but through the imagination’s capacity to dwell in them: “this dimension can be an infinite one”
(Bachelard 86). The metaphor (though not exclusively singled out for windows)
applies closely to Bond’s recurring use of the window as a threshold, which
anchors him in the everyday, yet, like Bachelard’s “intimate immensity” it
releases him into expanses of memory and reverie (185).Bond’s window does the
same, as it anchors him and frees him simultaneously. One gives a view of a
litchi grove, another opens onto a hill where fireflies glow like fairies.
These are not just views; they are scenes of memory, stitched together by a
gaze that lingers long enough to transform seeing into feeling.
The earlier works of Ruskin Bond also circle back to
windows and the view they offer. In these collections, his childhood
recollections are often anchored in the act of looking outat trees, at rain, or
at monkeys on rooftops. He writes, “the
trees seemed to know me. They whispered among themselves and beckoned me
nearer” (Rusty, the Boy From the Hills 31). That shared world is
often observed from the periphery, be it from a verandah, a shaded corner, or a
window. This peripheral gaze is important, since it is never dominant or
controlling. Rather, it is a form of ecological attention that listens more
than it asserts. Unlike the sublime distance in Romantic poetry, the author’s
gaze is proximate and affectionate.
He does not describe nature to elevate it, but he simply dwells in it. It is
the window, which allows for that dwelling. In The Hill of Enchantment,
he writes of the sun that “will burst
through my window and give new life to these ageing limbs” (74). The
wind nearly washes away his words. Nature is not just a view, but it is an
event, and the writer’s body is involved. This makes the window not a frame,
but a medium of encounter, where
the world is not aestheticized but felt. In Buell’s terms, Bond resists the
‘scenic’ model in that the window keeps nature as a co-presence whose rhythms
shape attention and memory (The Environmental Imagination7–8).Yet, the view has changed, and
the birds have stopped coming. The hills are still there, but something is
missing. The silence is deeper and the grief is understated, but unmistakable
as he writes, “They come no more; the
traffic has frightened them away”(The Hill of Enchantment74). The
window, previously a source of delight, transforms into an object of subdued
lamentation. Glenn Albrecht’s idea of ‘solastalgia’ properly describes the
emotional distress felt when one’s home environment is irreversibly disrupted
(Albrecht 32). Ruskin Bond does not label this condition, but it casts a shadow
over his writing. The view he once cherished is gradually fading. The window thus represents both enchantment
and loss, allowing for both presence and absence to be sensed more strongly.
Through the window, Bond bears witness to the slow vanishing of the world he loved, and perhaps, still
clings to in words. In The Hill of Enchantment, the window is not just
where light enters, but it is where the writer’s ethic of attention takes shape. It is not a romantic object, nor a
fixed idea. It is, rather, a way of being: of looking out, looking back, and
staying still long enough to hear the wind knock.
Kinship and Personification of
the Speaking Landscape
There is a certain quietness in Ruskin Bond’s
descriptions of nature, not the quiet of absence, but of presence so familiar
and trusted, that it no longer needs to announce itself. In The Hill of
Enchantment, Bond does not merely describe the trees, rivers, or winds; he
lives among them, listens to them, and lets them speak.“I was a child of blue skies and hot sunshine”, he announces (The Hill of Enchantment 32). The landscape is not just
backdrop – it is kin and character. Renu in her article asserts, “In many of
Bond’s stories, nature is not merely a setting but functions as a character in
its own right, influencing the mood, tone, and actions of the narrative” (145).
He writes, “The wind came across the valley and entered my soul. For the first
time in my life I felt a stirring that was both physical and mental—or
spiritual, if you prefer that word. … I wanted to do something, climb five
mountains or swim seven seas” (The Hill of Enchantment 81). The use of
‘stirring’ here is not ornamental, but it is reveals that the author’s
relationship with nature is lived and felt, and in fact, reciprocated. In his
world, nature carries moods and memory. He recalls the moments when the wind
sang softly through the trees, “Sometimes the wind is playful, light, and
breezy; it rustles in long grass and in the leaves of trees; it can be soft and
warm, fondling the good earth” (79–80).
He also reminisces about the time when the hills welcomed him back like an old
companion, “And from my window, I can
see the pine-knoll, that magic place where I found inspiration long ago.
I’m still here too, old friend” (76). Moments like this go beyond being poetic
flourishes and register recognition. He takes note of how human and
more-than-human lives are already entangled in feeling and rhythm. Therefore,
personification functions less as projection and more as acknowledgment.
What gives Ruskin Bond’s prose its emotional charge is
that this camaraderie is never exaggerated. It lives in the smallest of
gestures – in the sound of pine needles underfoot, in the touch of a familiar
tree trunk, in the return of an old path after years away. In describing a
simple walk back to his childhood home, he writes of being in the company of
the wind and the trees, who he asserts knew him and he could feel it, “I made
friends with the wind when I was eleven or twelve years old” (80). There is
something deeply moving about the way recognition travels both ways here. The
landscape knows him back. It remembers. Such reciprocity recalls Gaston
Bachelard’s reflections on space and solitude, when he says, “we are never real
historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an
expression of a poetry that was lost” (6). Bond’s landscape is steeped in this
kind of quiet poetics, which isnot invented for literary effect, but recovered
from a life deeply lived among hills and trees. In giving attention to the
small and the significant, such as the moss growing on an ancient roof or the
sound of footsteps on a quiet trail, the place is jolted out of its inertness.
It occasionally has a voice,and at times, a face and a memory.
All this contributes to making The Hill of Enchantment a narrative of a place and a record of
interbeing, rather than merely an autobiography. When Bond writes of his
comapanionship with the trees and the pine-knoll, he is describing a form of
presence that modern life has largely forgotten: the sense that one belongs to
a place as much as it belongs to you. The speaking landscape, for Bond, does
not cry out or demand, but simply waits. When one listens long enough, it
begins to tell stories. These stories do not unfold in neat chapters but in
wind-borne memories, scattered pinecones, sudden mists. The trees do not talk
like humans; they talk like themselves. Bond, more than most, knows how to
listen.
Memory, Loss, and Ecological Grief
In The Hill of Enchantment, Ruskin Bond returns
often to the ache of displacement, not just from people and places, but from a
larger world that is slipping away – of old trees felled, forests cut, hills
built over. This loss, however, is not simply nostalgia for an idyllic past; it
reflects a deeper form of what scholars now term ecological grief, which is “the grief felt in relation to
experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species,
ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental
change” (Cunsolo and Ellis 275). Bond’s grief and sense of loss is grounded in
concrete incursions rather than mere sentiment. He notes how development
ruptures the familiar cadence of hill life as he writes that, “The easy tenor of our lives was shattered by
a number of explosions on the hillside. Fragments of rock rattled on our old
tin roof” (The Hill of Enchantment55). More than anything sentimental here, it is only the steady,
echoing weight of loss. The natural landscape is remembered not as a background
object, but as a presence, a witness, and a being whose fall carries psychic
and emotional consequence. The weight of that disruption turns inward when he
revisits his beloved place and anticipates its vanishing: “I visited my secret pine knoll for the last
time, and felt I would not see that mountain stream again” (56). Such moments ask us to see nature
not as scenery but as a co-inhabitant capable of absence and of being mourned.
Rather than monumental lament, his response is to attend and remember: “Iwas absorbing the atmosphere of hill and
forest, and capturing some of their magic—and hopefully passing it on”
(47–48).
Bond returns to the pressure of estrangement from a wider
world slipping away as forests pare back and roads overwrite the hills. In one
particularly poignant recollection, he records the erosion of his beloved
Mussoorie intimately: “The road went
straight through the property, taking with it our little patch of forest. Oaks,
maples, pines, and our precious walnut tree were all bulldozed out of
existence. Birds and beasts fled to Pari Tibba, still untouched” (Bond, The
Hill of Enchantment55). Such
passages echo the sorrow found in Bond’s earlier essays like “The Last Tonga
Ride” in Rain in the Mountains, where the changing rhythms of life like,
horse-drawn carts replaced by taxis, quiet evenings by the din of traffic,
become metaphors for ecological and cultural extinction. The Himalayas, once
teeming with rustling trees and brooks, now risk becoming inert shells of the
past.
Despite everything, Bond does not give in to despair. His
grief is rarely loud; it is worn lightly, as when he notes from his window, “They come no more; the traffic has frightened
them away. Only the old crow visits me from time to time. I honour old friends”
(The Hill of Enchantment74).
That quiet, ordinary register corresponds to what Buell terms ‘toxic
discourse’, a culturally pervasive awareness of human-caused environmental
hazard that saturates ordinary life (Writing
for an Endangered World 30–31).The earth is not wept over in grand elegy,
but it is held in the palm of small, personal sorrow. Memory itself becomes a
practice of care in his confession, “I
write because I love this planet and all that’s beautiful upon it, and because
I want to record my impressions of it” (71). Without resorting to the
language of psychology or climate science, Bond renders the symptoms of loss –
of place, of silence, of birdsong – through lived particulars, letting small,
exact moments carry the weight of a changing world. His memoir asks us to
reckon not just with what we have done to the planet, but with the quieter ways
we continue to feel that loss – through silence, forgetfulness, and the soft
absence of trees no longer there.
Ecology as Practice: Gardening, Writing, and Making
In The Hill of Enchantment, the author’s bond with
the natural world transcends memory and sorrow. It surfaces in routines of
care, which becomes clear in his acts of gardening and writing. These are not just
pastimes, but also account for practices of ecological participation and ways
of creating and sustaining a livable space through conscious practice. In one
passage, he recalls starting modestly and sensibly: “…I planted the bulbs and of corms of wild ginger and irises. And then I
waited for it to rain” (109). Here, the simple act of tending is more
than a metaphor. It is a lived ritual of nurturing that weaves the human and
the more-than-human together. This childlike an attention to the seasons,
moods, and textures of the hills that builds up, story by story, into an
archive of environmental presence. Like his prose, his garden is small yet full
of meaning. The author expresses his fondness for particular flowers when he
states, “I loved flowers—the
fresh-faced cosmos, fragrant sweet peas, delicate petunias, upright hollyhocks,
bold sunflowers, scarlet poppies, sturdy snapdragons….” (108–109). Growth here is both botanical
and moral. The garden here is an earthly, tangible space where human action
directly supports life. The author does not romanticize nature from a distance.
He cultivates it with his own hands and writes it into existence.
This author’s ethic also informs his approach to writing.
When he talks about his day, he draws parallels between the patience of tending
plants with the patience of shaping sentences cutting back, letting in light,
and allowing the work to breathe. These habits run through his description of
the garden (108–111). Writing,
then becomes more than self-expression. It becomes an ecological act, a way of
moving with the rhythm of the seasons, in a quiet and slow change. It carries
the same care as gardening and asks for the same unhurried attention. His style
stays lean, like a well-kept bed, where nothing is wasted and everything oriented
toward what lies beyond the self. In a time saturated by screens and distance
from nature, the author insists on grounded observation. He suggests that
tending a plot, watering what one has planted, or composing a modest story
about the hills can count as ecological resistance. These account for small and
durable gestures that keep both place and a way of inhabiting it alive. Thus,
his gardening and his writing amount to an everyday environmentalism in not a
theory, but in an ethic of patience, and care.
Listening for the
Wind
“The wind came across the valley and entered my
soul”. – Ruskin Bond, The Hill of
Enchantment (81)
There is a moment in The Hill of Enchantment where Bond
describes standing on a pier, letting the wind lash against him, stinging his
face with salt spray. It is not a heroic moment, nor a triumphant one. However,
something in him shifts, as he stops resisting and listens. And in that
surrender to wind and water, something ancient and urgent stirs within him, as
he writes, “I turned and stood against it… and said to myself, ‘Calm down, I’m
on my way’” (91). Bond’s ecological sensibility is captured as truthfully as
possible in just a few lines.
Listening, for Bond, is a way of being. Throughout his
life and work, the wind has remained a constant companion. So have crows,
ferns, jackals, frogs, clouds, fireflies. They do not speak the language of
men, but they speak. The author, in his quiet way, has always listened. His
subtle proclamation of making friends with the wind in childhood is perhaps the
most honest thing a writer can say about his vocation (80). Not that he
mastered words, but that he befriended a world larger than his own self.
This paper has explored how The Hill of Enchantment transforms autobiography into an ecopoetic
practice of kinship – through the window as threshold, through the
personification of landscape, through memory and grief, through gardening and
writing as parallel gestures. Bond does not theorize these things, but he lives
them. This lived quality and emotional modesty give his writing its staying
power. In a time when much of environmental literature is marked by alarm or
spectacle, Bond offers a stillness, a patience, a willingness to dwell. His
ecological ethic does not erupt in protest – it hums in the background,
persistent as rain on a tin roof. He is not trying to save the world. He is
simply trying to remember it, name it, honour it. That act, as small as it may
seem, is one of resistance. Lawerence Buell argues that environmental
imagination by itself does not resolve ecological crisis, but it recalibrates
attention and responsiveness, and Bond’s words perform precisely this work of
attunement (Buell, Writing for an Endangered World 2–3).The hills are changing, with the
birds frequenting less often, and the trees falling to roads and wires.
Nevertheless, as long as Bond’s words endure, the enchantment lingers. The old
crow still taps at the window. The fireflies return to light the evening, which
he also metaphorically refers to as the “twilight” of his life, “They are
fireflies. And just as good as fairies. One of them settles on the windowsill,
a little glow-worm sending out a beacon of hope, lighting up the darkness. …
And then the room is full of fireflies, there must be ten or more of them, floating
gently here and there, bringing sweetness and light into the twilight of my
life” (115–116). In addition,
the wind, his oldest friend,still comes and goes, restless and free.To read
Bond is to remember how to listen. In keeping vigil with trees and winds, he
ensures that the world is not merely seen but accompanied. The task his writing
leaves us is to attend, mend, and, where we can, belong.
Works Cited
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for a New World. Cornell University Press, 2019.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space.
Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994,
Bond, Ruskin. The Hill of Enchantment: The
Story of My Life as a Writer. Aleph Book Company, 2023. Kindle edition.
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Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture. Harvard University Press, 1995.
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and Beyond. Harvard University Press, 2001.
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Climate Change, vol. 8, no. 4, 2018, pp. 275–281.
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