The little lane sneaks up into the land of the rich and famous. Prannoy Roy occupies one sprawling corner in the hills; Sachin Tendulkar inhabits another. Victor Banerjee has his hillside house and Vishal Bharadwaj has just bought his own summer retreat. This is Landour, where the houses are all as well guarded as their occasional inhabitants.

Down the lane, though, stands a little house whose doors are forever being knocked on by strangers. This is where Ruskin Bond — arguably the most loved writer in India — lives.

“I came to Mussoorie in 1963 because for a writer it was a very cheap place to be in,” says Bond, 78. Landour and Mussoorie in Uttarakhand are the twin towns that set the background of his books, emerging almost as characters. His new offering — Maharani, published by Penguin India — deals with the Mussoorie of the Sixties. Those were idyllic times — the Maharani discarded lovers and danced with Bond, who drank his scotch and watched the world go by.

“Recently, a former maharani met me and said she hoped the book wasn’t about her. I said, what makes you say so. She said, well, you danced with me when I was a schoolgirl in Shimla. And I said, You are not the only one,” Bond recounts.

He has, he modestly points out, known several maharanis. “This portrait of the maharani is a composite picture, but perhaps there is more of one than the others.”

Bond is a delightful, though hesitant, raconteur. He is like everybody’s favourite uncle — the one who has all those adventure tales to tell. He looks the part too — a ruddy, smiling face, and a paunch that’s giving a good fight to the brave shirt buttons seeking to hold it back. His humour is self-deprecating, and he punctuates his words generously with a you-know-what-I-mean “um”.

“One of things I am good at is this — I can create the past. I have a good mind for people and faces and information and trivia. So I start with something that’s part of my life, but being of a story telling nature, I start telling stories,” says Bond, whose paternal grandfather was a British soldier who came to India during the Afghan wars and whose maternal grandfather worked in the railways.

His own early life figures in many of his books. For a man whose writing is always like a bit of sunlight, his childhood was often dark. As a child, he later said, he felt his mother didn’t love him and caused his father pain. He and his mother came closer only when Bond was considerably older.

“My mother was alive when my books were published, but I hadn’t quite made it in a big way. Very nice book you’ve written, she’d say, but have you made any money from it,” Bond laughs.

He was 10 when he moved in with his mother and stepfather in Dehradun after his father’s death from malaria. “They were into enjoying themselves — which was fair enough. They liked parties, shikaar. They would ask me to come along but I was quite happy staying back home and reading.”

Among the best years of his life were the two he spent with his father, a trained teacher who joined the Royal Air Force during World War II. His father, he recalls, was fond of art and history, and took him to see old monuments. “I suppose I was named after John Ruskin,” he says, referring to the 19th century art critic. “There were no other Ruskins in the family.”

Almost 70 years after his death, his father often crops up in his thoughts and books. “I am 78 — and he only lived till 48,” he says.

What troubled him was that there was no closure to his father’s death. Then, in 2001, he visited his grave in Calcutta. “I knew he was buried in the military cemetery, but wasn’t sure where it was. And then I discovered it was in Bhowanipur, and a friend took me there. The friend puts flowers there every year.”

Bond’s life has taken quite a few turns. He worked in a tea estate in Munnar as a young man, did a stint of editing from Mussoorie and wrote columns in newspapers. “I was always throwing up jobs — relatives thought I was crazy, and I probably was.”

Today, he is one of India’s most prolific writers. He has written 120 titles — all of which are in print. Among them are A Flight of Pigeons, Scenes from a Writer’s Life and Vagrants in the Valley. The Room on the Roof won him the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1957.

It was this book that brought him back to India from England, where he had been sent after he finished school at Shimla’s Bishop Cottons. “I got a £50 advance from the book. I spent £40 on sea fare to return to India. I had £10 when I got down in Bombay. So I went to Dehradun. I had a small typewriter and started banging out stories and articles,” he says.

He continues to write his stories in his book-heaped house (“I sleep on my books”) in Landour, where he lives with his adopted family. He gave shelter to a young man decades ago, when he found him standing out on a cold day, looking for a job. Today, Prem’s family is his family.

He wakes up at dawn, and then “potters around a bit”. After breakfast, he starts writing. “Then I get very drowsy. I think I’ll sleep for a few minutes. When I wake up, two hours have passed. Then I have lunch,” he says with another of his short laughs. “You can see I am fond of food,” he adds, patting his paunch. “Then I have a drink in the evening.”

A drink? “Two or three,” he amends promptly. Bond, awarded the Padma Shri in 1999, is writing another novel. Some of his books have been filmed too. Bond even played a small role in Vishal Bharadwaj’s Saat Khoon Maaf, based on his book Suzzana’s Seven Husbands. “He made me a priest, but I am not a very priestly person.” He enjoyed his cameo though — and warmly recalls a kissing scene with Priyanka Chopra. “I gave her a fatherly peck, which lasted a long time. It was good fun but no further roles have been offered to me, so obviously I was not a great hit,” he says.

“I am terrible — I can’t draw, can’t sing, can’t dance,” Bond laments.

But, boy, can he tell a story.