It was an epiphany, more than intuition, when author Anuradha Roy and her husband, Rukun Advani, decided that they wanted to live in a derelict cottage in Uttarakhand’s Ranikhet 25 years ago. In Called by the Hills, Roy’s first non-fiction book, it is this “unexpected sensation of having seen a better world” that the author captures so gently: its sprawling forests and mountains, plants, birds and animals, the slow and often lazy life of mountain people, Roy’s beloved dogs, and her garden, which she so faithfully carved out of endless forest.
Through Roy’s effort to sustain this garden, a cast of characters emerges. Most striking among them is the Ancient, the housekeeper who “could eavesdrop in three languages”, and had firm opinions on how a Memsahib—and their gardens—should be. We meet Mr Singh, director of a government orchard, with his catch phrase ‘sophar-sogud (so far, so good)’ a family mantra for Roy. We also get a glimpse of her writing room, which Roy wonders is “writerly enough.”
Told with humour and enriched by literary reflections and beautiful illustrations, the book is difficult to categorise. But at its core, it is “a travelogue by someone who stopped travelling,” as Roy likes to call it.
This is your first non-fiction book. Did you always want to write it? And how different was the experience of writing non-fiction from fiction?
Had you asked me a few years ago if I was planning a non-fiction book with paintings, I would have laughed at the improbability. It wasn’t planned. I was painting almost every day, I was also writing, and at a certain point they came together. I’ve always written long, non-fiction essays on a variety of subjects, so it isn’t a new experience for me. The challenges are different: with fiction you have to create a living world out of nothing; but in this book, I had to work with a world that already exists, and I wanted to write about it without it turning into a mass of facts.
The garden is central to your narrative. Why did it become the heart of the book?
There is so much literature on gardens, their political, social, aesthetic, and philosophical meanings, but at the simplest level, home gardens reflect the owner’s taste. I’ve always had plants around me, however tiny the space, even in my room at my student’s hostel. It’s a luxury for anyone to have an actual garden, and when I found I had a patch of land I could turn into anything I pleased, it was like a blank sheet of paper for me—that is, until I realised the weather, the soil, cattles, all have a say in it. It is at the heart of the book because it offers me a way into understanding the landscape.
The book captures the stillness of mountain life alongside its harsher realities. In your view, how does this kind of coexistence shape a person?
When you see lightning forking above the peaks in a huge sky, and the trees are swaying and might fall, and then a giant rain comes, you can’t help but get a vivid sense of how insignificant humans are. The book is very much about the demands of the landscape and how it can alter you: give you a sense of your place in the natural world, show you that most things are beyond your control, train you to live with fewer needs, and understand solitude and silence.
Climate change seems to threaten the fragile ecology of the Himalayas. What do you have to say about it?
We can see from our home that the peaks of the Himalaya only have a sprinkling of ice and snow on their tops, even in winter. Twenty five years ago, the peaks were white till their bases. Climate change is mostly an abstraction in cities. Here, it is real and urgent, and most inhabitants know that giant projects, whether roads, hydroelectric, hotels or mining, come at a great cost. Experts routinely urge saner ways of development in the fragile Himalaya, but the profit motive cancels out every other.