During the 1970s and early 80s, Ruskin Bond's economic crisis as an author – one of the causes of his loneliness and self-pity – shows signs of alleviation as some publishers come forward to print his works in book form. Bond becomes more sensitive towards his past, the enterprises of which now bear fruit while a dynamic correspondence between his present feelings and his memory of the past equips him for a more mature negotiation with the anxieties of identity.

One of the attendant sentiments that engage his thoughts is the memory of his father. Aubrey's iconic influence on his son's authorial bearings finds occasion for cultural celebration as hope in the commercial viability of the vocation is redeemed. He begins ruminating on the memories of those places which are redolent with the impress of his father and writes ‘My Father's Trees Still Grow in Dehra' dedicates Strange Men Strange Places (1969) to his memory of a man ‘who when I was a small boy, led me by the hand up the steps of old forts and palaces, these memorials of forgotten men and places’ (Strange Men, 3); and visits his father's birthplace, Shajahanpur, where the incidents of A Flight of Pigeons take place. Nevertheless, the author's sensibilities of inheritance are so problematic that the unconscious concerns of belonging begin to revive from the anthropological recesses of his mind. Bond's sense of humanism includes memories of incidental rifts and differences that used to torment his sensibilities of space and time during his adolescent days.