Love letter to the hills

Agha Shahid Ali held the “half-inch Himalayas” in his hand. His home shrunk in his neat postcard in ‘The Country Without a Postcard’. Anuradha Roy has crammed hers into a 171-page love letter to the mountains. Her new book, ‘Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya’, is lyrical, evocative, quiet, joy-filled and so vivid that it carries with it a whiff of pine-scented air in polluted Delhi.

Twenty-five years ago, Anuradha and her husband Rukun — R, as he appears in the book — moved to the Himalayas beyond Ranikhet, where the “air turns to champagne”. In a world where hustle is the mantra for existence, they chose what is anathema today: stillness, solitude, and a screen-free world. The book is a chronicle of this life.

She writes of mountains not as a fairyland, but the reality of it — where time moves slowly; of starting over, as a cash-strapped publishing house; a threadbare house built over a lifetime; living at the edge of a forest watching seasons unfold. Her home, neighbourhood, neighbours, town, garden, all come alive. There is Sadar Bazaar, with Raju’s shop that had dial-up Internet — a lifeline when they moved as Internet then was the stuff of fantasy.

There are people who inhabit her world — Amit, a “frail, gentle alcoholic” who lived nearby, his face “ravaged by rum and grief”. He became her chief ally on growing things. He had moved with his wife Anjali to the hills when she had been diagnosed with cancer. She “lived eighteen years, more than enough for them to build a garden together”. Much of Anuradha’s garden is borrowed from his bit of green. There’s ‘The Ancient’, her housekeeper who came with the house — a package deal — disapproving of her not being the true memsahib and her efforts at trying to garden. True memsahibs didn’t get their hands dirty. And Pandeji-ki-biwi, the chowkidar’s wife.

A lot of the book is mulch focused. Gardening is something Anuradha tries her hand at — inherited from her geologist father who loved growing plants. Her essays take the reader through her journey of making the Himalayas home and sowing and turning the garden in her head into reality. “I wanted fruit trees, creepers that would climb the trunks of those trees, particular flowers, even vegetables,” she writes in ‘The Earthly Look’, a chapter that is an ode to fertilisers.

It is hard to make fertiliser a vehicle for philosophy. But she does. Whether it was “so malodorous it was hard to imagine anything perfumed emerging from it”, or her manure experiments with rotted cow dung the colour of dark chocolate, “glistening pink worms” to feed the soil “dark as coffee grounds” — Anuradha makes this essential ingredient into a lesson of wonder and creativity.

The most intensive tending of the garden happens as it settles into winter hibernation, she writes. It’s the time to spread manure and sprinkle seeds that you forget until summer. In January, the cold rain soaks the manure and then the snow “covers it”.

“By the time the sun moves again, the earth will be ready to give rather than take,” she writes. The chapter chronicles her experiments with soil and gardens, but it could be a metaphor for inspiration. The lime tree took two decades to flower. Things take time is the theme of the book — and waiting, for spring, for flowers, for words.

Beautifully produced, the words will linger, as will the paintings. The pages are edged with red. Unlike other writers, Anuradha has remained resolutely old school — very few interviews and practically a ghost on social media. This book, however, is a window to her world. “My working life in writing seems somewhat absurd in a town where few people read, and fewer still read in English,” she writes.

Part notebook, it has her observations, paintings and sketches. (She is also a potter and plays the flute). Fellow writers make an appearance. Bill Aitken, who ran away from Scotland mesmerised by Nanda Devi; Chandi Prasad Bhatt, the activist and writer who knows the Kumaon; Durga C Kala, who lived in a cottage smaller than theirs and spent decades working on the biography of Jim Corbett.

Or writers whose words and books line her shelves. Leela Majumdar’s memoirs. Her dogs Baruni Junction, Biscoot and Jerry, her “magic” dog that appeared in fiction in ‘The Earthspinner’ as Chinna, a pint-sized silky black excitedly running through the books. The langurs on her roof find themselves as part of the pages, as do the berries that she tries to turn into jam.

The book is a chronicle of a life changed, but it also bears witness to the destruction. The mountains are magical, but they’re also wounded, and in her last essay, she writes of rain, temperatures of 40 in the Himalayas and turning them into an urban mess. As Anuradha opens up about her life, it forces you to confront life, the meaning of it, chasing speed and contentment.

For city-dwellers, this is a book that has lessons about patience. As much as it is about playing the flute for birds — and writing about it, the stuff that passes you by in cities choked with smoke.

In a speed-obsessed world, Anuradha finds stillness and writes about finding joy in the ordinary and staying rooted to the spot.

“Planting flowers? It will be years before you see anything,” a ‘sturdy’ woman with goats told her as she stood in her rubbish-clogged earth when they moved in. “Everything happens in its own time. Flowers bloom in their own time. And half of them will die.”

This piece of advice — unsolicited — is the lesson that you carry in your head and heart. ‘Called by the Hills’ is about wilderness, of being wild, the impermanence of life and healing. Of the power of nature and of a four-letter word — slow.

— The writer is a literary critic