Ruskin Bond did not feel at home in England. His yearning for the Indian atmosphere and the ‘human contact’ of the company of Somi, Kishen and other Indian friends in the environs of Dehra Dun is projected in The Room on the Roof. A work written in exile, it portrays the author's notion of place and belonging. A contextualist idea of the individual – the individual posited in the context of his human and non-human environment rather than in the Cartesian boundary of his self – is fused with the subjective concerns of place. For Bond, space is invested with an animated subjectivity that works in a horizontal relationship with his androgyny. The cessation of parental contact – his mother's separation and father's death – instilled in him a sense of lonely abjection that the non-human nature helped him to master in many ways. His father helped him attune his feelings to nature in one such way. In his absence, the child's Oedipal drive is held in balance by the agency of the environment. Nature acts as an imaginary correspondent in the form of a tactile, physical care-giver. It assumes the role of the motherer. Bond's perception of nature is engendered by his corporeal experience of location and his father's presence in it. The Indian environment and the Hindu myth – in contrast to the West's Cartesian concept of selfish circumscription – contextualizes the self in the same manner in which the eco-feminist philosopher, Jim Cheney, shows (117–134) that tribal cultures contextualize discourse.