“I had a long way to go,” Anuradha Roy discloses in Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, a genre-coalescing memoir chronicling life in the hill town of Ranikhet in Uttarakhand. Roy and her husband (Rukun Advani, referred to as R throughout) relocated to the hills from Delhi in 2000, somewhat improbably making their home in a “derelict cottage” framed by shining peaks, on the outskirts of an estate owned by publisher Ravi Dayal. The same year they launched the independent publishing house, Permanent Black. Since then, they have been apprentices to the surrounding terrain: “It would take us long years to identify unfamiliar nocturnal sounds, to tell apart the shout of a barking deer from the sawing of a leopard, to recognise the soft hoot of the scops owl.” 

Roy’s first book-length work of creative non-fiction reads as 12 interlinked, freewheeling personal essays marked by dulcet prose, iridescent watercolour illustrations by her that capture the lilt of the landscape, deep historical and anthropological research, manifold allusions and quotations, bracing wit and humour, wryly affectionate social commentary, fidelity in reporting myriad more-than-human and human presences encountered along the way, and haunting asides on gender perceptions, growing older, socio-economic inequity, and climate change. Set in a corner of the earth about which most know little, Roy’s book is a thing of quiet beauty amid the muck, a disarming, unflinching piece of nature/place writing befitting our times. 

But there is more in terms of through lines. In a work whose chief preoccupations are gardening and writing, it is telling that the narrator has a severe case of imposter syndrome when it comes to both. Even as she illumines life in the hills in elegant, self-assured strokes and lovingly lists all the ecological marvels she has encountered in 25 years, Roy repeatedly undercuts her own expertise. She emerges as a diffident learner with unlikely, unflagging commitment, a novice groping in the dark, unsure of her worth or relevance. “If the world thinks I am doing nothing, it isn’t altogether inaccurate. I still feel fraudulent when I fill in ‘writer’ in the box next to Occupation. Is mine a real occupation? As real as being a cowherd? To retreat into a place you have invented, to write something nobody is asking you to write or waiting for—is that work? Lives wouldn’t be lost without one more book. Libraries wouldn’t shut.”

The chapter titles are also telling. In “Accidental Lodging”, Roy describes her first sighting of the cottage, its floor “a soggy, foul mess”, its windows “blinded by parchment-yellow sheets of newspaper”, its ceiling “an exposed ribcage of rough wooden beams”, its only inhabitant a dog with a slowly wagging tail. She goes on to blend the personal with the human history of Ranikhet, from original-native peoples through colonial settlers who resided first in convalescent homes and then in graves, to the roughly thousand dwellers of the hill station in the present day. 

The second chapter, titled “The Ancient”, is devoted to the cantankerous housekeeper “Ama” who combines “medicinal caring” with “an unnerving streak of ruthlessness [which] made her in my mind’s eye a leading contender for the role of a matriarch in The Sopranos”. We also meet Roy’s mother in this chapter, painting, making friends with the Ancient.

Getting your hands dirty

Opening with a reference to mountaineer Frank Smythe’s book, The Valley of Flowers (1938), the third chapter titled “The Earthy Look” (engraver-writer Clare Leighton’s phrase) is pivotal to Roy’s enterprise, describing her first attempts at gardening. “Freedom apart, I didn’t have much else, neither experience, nor anything more than a foggy awareness of the delicate, interdependent world of weather, soil, seasons, animals, and within all this, plants.” Guidance comes in the form of Bengali writer Leela Majumdar, who teaches Roy “gardening patience”, much needed in an unyielding landscape (Roy has translated her work into English). “Weeds were everywhere, mainly stinging nettles of great venom and a harsh green ugliness. Digging, we discovered decades of refuse…” 

It is in this third chapter that Roy movingly recalls her gardener-father, renowned for his green thumb. “Like him, I’ve grown to breathe in deeply the smell of rotting cow dung that is the colour of dark chocolate, rich and shiny, through which the pink worms slide away.” She poetically underscores horticultural writer Anna Pavord’s emphasis on getting your hands dirty. “Gardeners leathery from long hours in the sun, their clothes earth-stained, their bodies smelling of sweat and manure, went about their chores like slow, heat-stunned shadows in quiet communion with the soil.” The rankness of manure is something to revel in; a heady harbinger of new growth. 

The chapter that follows, “Illegal Immigrants”, reveals Roy’s “lawless past”, times she smuggled in hollyhocks from Saint-Nazaire and oak saplings from England to plant them in her patch of ground. “About the Dogs” is, predictably, an ode to canine companions Biscoot, Barauni, Piku, Soda, and beloved Jerry. The last is “fiction turned into fact”, a real-world manifestation of Chinna, the fictional dog in Roy’s fifth novel The Earthspinner (2021). The sixth chapter, “A Writing Room”, meditates on procrastination, on the contrast between other established authors’ exquisitely arranged, expertly photographed dens and Roy’s rain-battered, insect-ridden workspace in the cottage, reinforcing the motif of writerly imperfection, inadequacy. 

“The Garden of Absent Friends” is an elegy for lonesome neighbour Amit, a “frail, gentle alcoholic” whose cottage was “permeated” with his wife Anjali’s absence; she died of cancer after they had built a home and gardened together for 18 years. Providing a reprieve from this tragedy, Roy confesses in “A Shop of My Own” to a “recurring desire”: to be a shopkeeper on Mall Road. The imaginary shop “is a warm happy place where glass jars with freshly baked biscuits sit on sweet-smelling pinewood shelves”. 

Fears in solitude

Roy tramps up and down the hill in the ninth chapter, “The Chroniclers and Preservers”, in search of the kilmora berry, which she determinedly turns into jam despite local ridicule. We meet the gin-swilling, lemon-pickle-making ascetic Durga C. Kala, who is a devoted biographer of Jim Corbett, and scholar-activists Shekar Pathak and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, “as rooted in the mountains as the deodars”. Chapter Ten, “The Barbet of the Hill”, is a paean to all manner of birds and birdsong. “As our winters turn shorter, warmer, drier, the birds too come late and leave early,” Roy says. She also worries about the unseasonal appearance of insects such as the hummingbird hawk-moth. Next comes “Gently Sideways”, a painfully honest and hilarious meditation on writing and the creative process which culminates in a description of Roy’s futile attempts to persuade a local hotel manager to display her Ranikhet-based novel for tourists. 

“I felt as if I had the Himalayas in my hands as I read it,” newly-minted memoirist Chloe Dalton, of Raising Hare (2024) fame, has written on the back cover of Roy’s book. But sadly, the mountains themselves seem to be slipping through our fingers. The concluding chapter, “The Wounded Mountain”, chronicles in devastating detail the consequences of reservoir/dam building—in particular, the laying of a water line up the mountains—for migrant labourers, Ranikhet residents, and forest-dwellers.

After the vanishing of foxes, another tragedy unfolds close to home. A beloved canine is killed by a leopard likely roaming closer to human settlements owing to “habitat loss from floods and fires”. In some sense, the entire book hinges around this death. It is a terrible loss, “a warning from dying and warped nature about the devastation facing all the blithely unsuspecting infants of the world”.

Beginning with the exquisite epigraph in which Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (Li Po) juxtaposes ephemerality with permanence, Called by the Hills inscribes the moment with the certain knowledge of its disappearance. Roy’s memoir is painstakingly written and produced, with every word and image present because it simply must be, every borrowing (plants, artworks, ideas, words) honoured. When you turn the last page, slowly, reluctantly, it is hard to say goodbye. W.S. Merwin’s “Separation” (1962) comes to mind: “Your absence has gone through me/ Like thread through a needle/ Everything I do is stitched with its color.” 

Writing is “resurrection,” Roy suggests, a means to mark wounds, a striving for closure, an attempt to reconstruct what and who has gone without explanation or warning. Writing—especially in the face of climate change—is also digging (as Seamus Heaney famously averred) through decades, centuries, of refuse. And though many are—and much is—gone, they are not, in fact, lost, precisely because there exists one more, assuredly vital, book. Roy’s.

As horrific climate disasters from around the world flood our newsfeeds, this sensitively wrought account of the hills invites us to remember, to read with attention, to engage with the local realities of our place with identical perseverance, nuance, stillness, and solidarity.

Akhila Ramnarayan is a writer, theatre actor, indie musician, and college educator at Krea University.

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