‘I wanted to write with feeling, but without sentimentality’: Anuradha Roy on her Himalaya memoir

“For those travelling from cacophonous cities to these hills, this silence can seem menacing. It is broken only by the calls of birds and animals, cow bells, and the cries of unseen herdsmen across the slopes. Some friends of mine run from it, restless and bored after a day or two. One of them was too fearful to leave the safety of our house at all. A few find that the forest changes something inside them for good: no other place, however beautiful or exciting, will ever mean to them what the Himalaya does. These are the people who keep coming back. Some decide to live here, as we have.”

When novelist Anuradha Roy and her husband chanced upon a dilapidated cottage in Ranikhet, they decided to make it their home. Leaving behind the hustle and bustle of their city life in Delhi, the couple embraced the gradual pace of life in the hills. Twenty-five years later, she wrote her first work of non-fiction, Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, an intimate memoir capturing her observations and experiences.

In a conversation with Scroll, Roy spoke about, among other things, the moment she decided to live in the hills, her favourite mountain writers and her experiments with art and gardening.

This is your first work of nonfiction. How different was writing it after five of your previous novels?
It’s my first full-length work of nonfiction, but I’ve always written essays, especially travel essays, and I approached this book as a kind of travelogue. Only I was writing about a place where I wandered to and then stayed. With fiction, you have to create a living, breathing, thinking, speaking world out of nothing; here, I had to work with a world that already exists, both in my memory and in the present, which I wanted to write knowledgeably and with feeling, but without pedantry or sentimentality. I enjoyed the process very much.

Please describe for our readers the moment when you decided, or knew (“more epiphany than intuition”), that you would live in a cottage in the hills.
Despite many visits, I had never seen the snow peaks that Ranikhet was renowned for. One morning, when I was there for a few days during the rains, the peaks emerged from the clouds, we ran down to a vantage point for a glimpse and we came across a small, ruined cottage there, in which was a dog, wagging its tail at us. That was the moment when it felt somehow obvious that we would live in the hills, maybe in that very place. Fortunately, the cottage belonged to friends, the publishers Ravi and Mala Dayal, and they were happy to let us turn it into a home. It changed our lives.

You write that living in a remote area makes one forge a community and depend on it far more than in cities. Tell us more.
We depend on each other here because there is not much infrastructure to depend on, especially when it comes to medical problems. It’s a small place where most people know each other, share the same problems. So, if you need help, people will do everything they can for you – knowing you will do the same for them. I have a sense of an unintrusive support structure, a network everyone relies on both for the good things and the bad.

The book is full of beautiful illustrations and even a set of lovely postcards of your watercolours and sketches. Were these paintings collected over a period of time? Tell us a little about your work as an artist.
I used to paint constantly but had suddenly and unaccountably stopped, instead focusing entirely on making pots. I had begun to feel that I was no good with colour, that I painted very badly, and so on. This changed when I went on a writing residency where one of the other writers, Sophie Herxheimer, was working on a graphic novel. She is a trained artist, and wherever she went, she whipped out her little watercolour pad, basic paintbox and brushes, and started on a picture. With her, I began painting again – mostly my surroundings. It was exhilarating – to sit still and quietly, compulsively, paint together. When I came back home, I continued. It was as if I was seeing the familiar landscape around me afresh: how the light fell, how the roads swirled up and down the slopes and curved round the bends, how the roots of trees bound up the rocks. That was how the pictures for the book gradually came about.

You are a keen gardener. Tell us about some of your interesting gardening experiments and valuable lessons you have learned in your journey.
One interesting experiment was an English oak that I grew from an acorn someone gave me. I had to wrap the acorn in damp tissue and leave it in the fridge and just like a bean, it sprouted. I hung it in a narrow-necked flask, with the sprout touching water. It was fascinating to see the sprout grow and branch out into a root system, and one incredible day, the acorn split at the top and a leaf emerged. The plant is now rooted in soil and is still alive, though I don’t know how long it’ll survive. What I have learned is that like life, the garden is unpredictable, and you have to be tough about loss and disappointment.

“Twenty-five years on, I know the precise bend on the road to Ranikhet where the air changes to champagne. We draw deep breaths here. If we were balloons, we would inflate to the tips of our toes and fingers. Soon a line of houses appears, roses tumbling over their roofs, geranium-laden tin cans on their windowsills. People and dogs idle by the small shops, and tea is slurped from ribbed glasses whose long intimacy with the liquid is apparent from their colour. No point hurrying. Things happen, after all, in their own time.”

In the book, you write that time is more elastic in the mountains. Please elaborate.
That’s actually true of all places, and the idea is that of relativity. However, in the hills, you might become more aware of this because there are so many things you cannot hurry: the plants that take time to grow; the man at the shop who wants to chat before he serves you; any journey to the city takes a whole day. Meanwhile, other things happen at the speed of light: falling trees, landslides, for example. So, your idea of time and efficiency has to change if you are to live here without irritation or anxiety.

In the book, you describe your writing room. Please tell our readers more about your writing process.
I don’t have any special process other than being disciplined and regular when working on a book. I wake up early, I work a few hours in the morning and then carry on if the dogs we have let me. I have many notebooks for jottings, for outlines. When I am starting a book, I tend to write on paper, in ink, out of old habit, I suppose. I noticed the other day that on a riverbank walk I was doing along with a lot of young people in Calcutta, I was the only one making notes on paper, into a notebook!

During the course of the book, you have researched a number of authors who have written about the hills. Which are some of your personal favourite “mountain writers”?
I love the Bengali book by Leela Majumdar, Aar Konokhane, in which she writes of her childhood in Shillong. Another mountain travelogue, also in Bengali, that I really enjoyed was Truck Bahoney MacMahoney, Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s story of her intrepid travels to Tawang. (This book also exists in an English translation by Arunava Sinha). Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers, A Walk in the Himalaya, about plant collecting in Nepal, is observant and refreshingly unromantic. I very much like the books of Stephen Alter, especially Becoming a Mountain. Also, Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s Gentle Resistance and Bill Aitken’s Footloose in the Himalaya, both of which we published at Permanent Black. There are actually too many books to name.

In the book, you talk about climate change and global warming in the mountains. Do you feel that city dwellers moving considerably to the hills, especially post-COVID, has helped the economies of these places, or has it adversely affected them in the long run?
It’s been a mixed blessing for the hills, and if it is good for the economy, this is only in the short term. It’s led to a furious pace of construction with no thought to the future – where will water come from, for all these people? With much of the forest gone, what happens to the climate or to wildlife? I am reading a book by Richard Flanagan, Question 7, in which he writes, “Now that world we oddly disdain as the non-human – as though we are somehow separate from it – is vanishing. And with it, unnoticed, a different, larger way of being human… Could it be that what is being lost with that world is us?”

What are you working on next?
I’m not yet ready to talk about it.

Also read:

‘Called by the Hills’: Anuradha Roy’s profoundly likeable book about making a home in Ranikhet

Disclosure: Arunava Sinha is the Books and Ideas section editor at Scroll.