Towards the end of the 90s, Ruskin Bond invokes the ghost of his abject self as it was lived in the uncertain days of yet another turning point in Indian history. The fictionalized expression of the self's desires and fears in A Flight of Pigeons now becomes an autobiographical experience.

In 1997, the fiftieth year of India's independence, the BBC chose to broadcast a short but significant biographical vignette, ‘The Playing Fields of Shimla’, which Bond wrote as part of his Memoir. The author narrates the nostalgic experience of his adolescent friendship with a Muslim friend, Omar, in Bishop Cotton School at Shimla in India during the days of the Raj; how they come close to considering each other their alter-egos and in one of their joint intrigues find a tunnel in a defunct drainage pipe in the school's third flat to escape into a no man's land. These idyllic excitements cease with the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, forcing Omar to migrate to an unknown land called Pakistan. The feeling of estrangement comes to a head during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, when Bond finds out that one of the pilots of the Pakistani bomber, which is shot down by Indian flak near the playing field of his Shimla school is Omar. Bond's apparently innocuous manner of narrating his childhood memories hides concerns of identity.