A Town Called Dehra

Sometimes certain things become totems. You do not realize when you start placing emotions onto things. For some, it’s a stone they collected from a beach they visited years ago with their family. For others, it might be a piece of tissue paper from a café where they had their first date. You would be surprised by the things we give meaning to, and that is what makes us human.

However weird something may be, we still keep it somewhere we can see it. Because it represents us. For me, it is this book: A Town Called Dehra by Ruskin Bond.

Ruskin Bond is an Anglo-Indian author based in the hill town of Landour in the lower Himalayan ranges of India. For those who are unaware, Anglo-Indian is a term given to the British who settled in India for business or administrative purposes under colonial rule, but decided not to leave after the country gained independence. Many chose not to leave simply because they had grown accustomed to the life here, and many because they fell in love with this land and saw themselves nowhere else but here.

Ruskin Bond comes from that background. Orphaned at a young age, his father was part of the Royal Indian Air Force stationed in India. After his father passed away, he lived with his aunts and uncles, and at times with his estranged mother and stepfather, until she too passed away. Ruskin spent the majority of his youth in the city of Dehradun, a quiet little town surrounded by the Shivalik ranges of the Himalayas. Throughout his adulthood, he traveled all around India, and for a brief period lived in England, but eventually returned to Dehradun and settled there as a renowned children’s author. Many of his stories have become cult classics in India, and some have also been adapted into films.

Anyways, I write all this not just to celebrate his life as my favorite author, but also to celebrate this book, which I brought along with me as a totem when I moved to the US for my studies four years ago. I connect with this book for many reasons, but particularly because I spent my early and late teens in the same city of Dehradun that becomes the backdrop of this beautiful coming-of-age story. Gosh, I will never forget my time there. Although it has changed quite a lot since he wrote his story, it still carried the underlying spirit, one which I acknowledge is slowly dying in the new dawn of the country. But the subtle charm of a small hill station town, with renowned bakeries, hilltop viewpoints, a slower life, and a vibrant community, still lingers in my memory.

I go back to this book, or at least I try to, almost once every month. Sometimes I just read random chapters or pages that transport me to a time and place I will cherish forever, untainted by the struggles of adulthood and the experience of leaving home early on.

I did not realize the space this book holds in my heart until I clicked this photograph for one of my college projects. The prompt was clear: photograph what you cherish the most. And suddenly it was clear what I wanted to photograph. I guess in a new world, all I really trusted were the memories I held of my life before, and of course Ruskin Bond, whom I have never met, but feel like I have known forever. I clicked this photograph using a large-format film camera on 4x5 film.