Ruskin Bond, born in Kasauli in 1934, grew up in Jamnagar, Dehradun, New Delhi and Shimla. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, which was written when he was seventeen, received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then he has written over 500 short stories, essays and novellas (including Vagrants in the Valley and A Flight of Pigeons) and more than forty books for children. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1992, the Padma Shri in 1999, the Delhi government's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 and Padma Bhushan in 2014 for his contribution to literature.The stories in this collection capture the essence of the Indian Railways from the small-town station, at the time of the Raj to the present day big-city stations bursting at the seams. The teeming and varied life of the Indian Railway station and its environs have fascinated writers from Jules Verne in the 1870s to more recently Satyajit Ray, R.K. Laxman and more modern writers. In this anthology, one of India's best-known writers makes a selection of the greatest railway stories the subcontinent has produced.
