This story shows why Ruskin Bond’s supernatural fiction is some of his finest writing

When I was in my early twenties, a struggling freelance writer, I rented two small rooms above a shop in Dehradun, and settled down to make my fortune as an author. Or so I hoped.

The rooms were without electricity, the landlord (the shop owner) having failed to pay the electricity bills for several years; but this did not bother me. Dehra wasn’t too hot in those days, and I had no need of a ceiling fan. And I thought an oil lamp would be sufficient and even quite romantic.

Hadn’t the great authors of the past penned their masterpieces by the light of a solitary lamp? I could picture Goethe labouring over his Faust, Shakespeare over his Sonnets, Dostoyevsky over his Crime and Punishment (probably in a prison cell) and Emily Brontë composing Wuthering Heights by the light of a flickering lamp while a snowstorm raged across the moors that surrounded her father’s lonely parsonage.

Many geniuses would have written by lamplight – Premchand in his village, Keats in his attic, poor John Clare in a madhouse… Well, I was no genius and I had no wish to enter a madhouse, but I liked the idea of writing by lamplight, so I invested in a lamp and a bottle…

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