Whenever Ruskin Bond was beset by personal and professional problems, he claimed to have turned to writing for children. He thought that writing for children needed a less subjective approach that would help him get away from himself. Bond's wish to get away from himself is in fact a psychological quest to be his other. Perry Nodelman (29) equates orientalism with the concept of ‘the Other’ – of that which was opposite to the person doing the talking or thinking or studying. According to Lacan, ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’ (Fundamental Concepts, 172). Lacan explored how the other is what defines the self not only by being what the self is not, but by being only what it lacks and therefore what it both fears and desires. The way in which Bond tends to see children as wonderfully innocent, primitive, and desirably different reveals their function for him as this Lacanian sort of other. He makes childhood his own unconscious, prior to and separate from his real human life. In claiming to write for children, he uses a generic space to enact the quest for self-discovery. As an adult writing for the child, he carefully structures a self-referential trope or hides a reflective core within the narrative. Here I will take up two of Ruskin Bond's apparently innocuous ghost stories, written in 1999: ‘Wilson's Bridge’ and ‘Night of the Millennium’ – otherwise pleasant reading for young adults – to show how they represent the dynamics of identity formation that engender the author's mind. I will attempt a comparable analysis of Rudyard Kipling's The Phantom Rickshaw, which appears to me a partial model for Bond's stories.