I will now take up a few texts that Ruskin Bond composed mid-career, in the 1960s and 70s, to diagnose how the authorial unconscious betrays itself in the process of signification. I will begin with a short autobiographical anecdote, ‘The Last Time I Saw Delhi’, which embodies the author's feelings on his visit to see his mother in a Delhi hospital awaiting an operation on her left breast at 54. Although the story is written in present continuous, we are not supposed to think that the author was actually putting the words on paper during the conversation. Published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in the late 1980s, the original draft of the sketch was made in 1967.

Ruskin Bond recounts the story from memory, as well as from notes jotted down in a Delhi hotel. Through the metonymic absence of the factual reality traces of the entire history of the retroactive past permeate the signifying procedure. This trace is like the ‘faded negative’ of the photo of the author's maternal grandparents that the narrator says was lying with him before he cared to print it with the intention of presenting it to his mother in hospital. The printed photo becomes the metaphorical mirror for the subject to anticipate union with the mother. The act of printing metaphorically secures the unconscious from obscuration, a fact that can be testified in the repetitive literalization of the historically inflected moment of the imaginary event twenty years later, in 1997, when Bond speaks about his mother in his Memoir.