Called by the Hills, by Anuradha Roy

I intended to read Called by the Hills by Anuradha Roy soon after copies arrived at the bookshop last year. But then I learned that my sister had just finished reading it, and I reluctantly moved on to other books, following our unspoken rule of not reading the same books, so we could keep adding to the books we recommend in the shop. Could we have come up with anything more absurd? So utterly at odds with our other (spoken) rule that we would always read whatever we wanted and never let the fact that we have a bookshop dictate what we read. This is the sensible rule. 

And so it was that I picked up this memoir a couple of days ago, which turned out to be an utterly enchanting read. Roy was asked by her publisher, during the Covid lockdown, to write a book on the Himalaya, specifically the flowers of the region. By then she had lived in Ranikhet for twenty five years. When she began this account, however, she realized she could not write a book about her garden that did not also include everything around it - her life in the hills and the people (and animals) in it.

When they first came across the dilapidated cottage on the slopes of Ranikhet more than two decades ago, Roy and her husband instinctively knew that this was going to be their home. The cottage was one of several outhouses on the edge of a 19th-century estate owned by publisher friends of theirs who were happy to let them have the use of it. The couple renovated the cottage with the help of a local NGO and moved in as soon as it was mildly feasible. They had just started their own publishing house and worked from their new home in the hills. This was a time when mobile phones were far from ubiquitous and internet was only sporadically available. To access their emails, they would trudge down every couple of days to Raju’s Taxi Shop on Mall Road that had a phone and a patchy dial-up internet service. On some days, their attempts at downloading would fail. Raju would apologize and mutter “Today the bytes are weak. They can’t climb the mountains.”

We read about Roy’s dogged efforts at cultivating a garden, inviting scrutiny and criticism from Ama (or “the Ancient” as Roy refers to her), their housekeeper who came with the house. The Ancient’s style was to have the plants lined up as if they were soldiers standing at attention. She also preferred roses over what she called the “jungli local plants” that Roy was partial to. The two of them battle it out with their trowels. The garden matters to Roy. This patch of hers in the mountains is the first piece of land where she has the opportunity to make a garden. What she lacks in her knowledge of soil, weather, or plants, she more than makes up for in enthusiasm and persistence. In addition to scoring seeds and saplings from friends and neighbors, she visits the local government nursery where she is given some fruit saplings, but only after she offers prayers at the local temple. The orchard director’s oft-repeated phrase of “Sophar-sogud” becomes a mantra for Roy and her husband, and they find themselves muttering it when they manage to avert disaster of any kind, or sometimes for no reason at all. 

Roy writes about their dogs, whom she loves more than the hills, and four of whom share their tiny cottage - there is Biskoot, Barauni Junction, Piku, Soda, and Jerry (whom they share with a neighbouring family). She writes about her various neighbors, some of whom are experts in the region’s natural history and graciously share their botanical advice whenever she seeks it. In a ‘A Shop of my Own’ the opening line reads “Every now and then I am seized by the desire to open a small shop on Mall Road”. I wrote in the margins “This is how it begins! Do not do it!” This desire for a shop generally intensifies right after Roy finishes a novel, when she becomes conscious of this gaping void that she feels a need to fill. Her husband, who comes from a family of merchants and whose father was a legendary bookseller in Lucknow, chooses to studiously ignores her each time she brings this up. 

Over the twenty five years that they have spent in Ranikhet, the region has transformed. The dazzling white peaks now look bare in summer; the foxes and squirrels that were a fixed presence for years have disappeared. Leopard numbers are up, and faced with a loss of habitat from the frequent floods and forest fires, their contact - and conflict - with the human population is also on the rise. 

The life that Roy has carved out in the hills is a gentle one. She writes that “my version of exploring the mountains is perhaps an intimate one, which doesn’t have the drama of extreme terrain but consists in getting to know my immediate environment as closely as if I were a lover who needed to understand and memorize every detail of a beloved; the folds of the hills, the bushes in its dark and secret parts, the contours and curves, the changes of light and the changes of colour in each season.”

Now, I am unlikely to summon up any degree of equanimity when a leopard circles my little cottage all night looking for food after having missed a kill. Or when a group of scorpions suddenly tumbles out of a dark corner in the cottage. Alas, I may never be a true “hill person”, and must be content to be a visitor, never a resident. But I can turn to writers like Anuradha Roy, a “hill person” through and through, and experience vicariously and in such vivid detail, the sights and the sounds, the birds and the flowers, and this incomparable life in the Himalayan hills from my home in the plains.