A boy with an extra thumb who excels in spin bowling and a beauty contest of birds with an owl for a judge and a tiny redstart for a winner. These are just two of the half-a-dozen stories that Ruskin Bond has conjured up, propped in his bed in a spacious room in a leafy villa in Dehradun’s tony Dalanwala as he recovers from a spinal surgery he underwent a few months ago. “Lying here, my imagination works overtime,” he smiles. “I can’t walk up the steep stairs of my house in Mussoorie but I don’t mind being here. After all, I grew up here. My grandfather settled here in the 1900s, he was here from the time that the first train came in,” says the author of Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra (1991), who turned 92 on May 19. The surgery may have confined him mainly to a room, but his mind has been free to roam around everywhere. “It’s hard to stop me from writing.…