Anuradha Roy’s ‘Called By the Hills': An artist's eye meets a naturalist’s grief
In ‘Called by the Hills’, her first book-length non fiction work, Anuradha Roy pays a literary and painterly tribute to her home in the Himalayas
Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills, her first book-length work of non fiction, is a thing of beauty. Illustrated by the author with exquisite watercolour paintings, mostly of flora and fauna, it is a lushly produced volume, each page redolent with the sights and smells of the Himalayan town of Ranikhet, where Roy has lived with her husband, the publisher Rukun Advani, and their dogs for the last 25 years. Parts of this book have appeared before as occasional pieces in newspapers and magazines, but the fragments have been woven together into a seamless whole by an immersive narrative thread as well as the gorgeous artwork.
From the couple’s first arrival in the hills to spend some time at a cottage that belonged to publisher Ravi Dayal and his wife Mala to their decision to become tenants (and 25 years on, full-time residents of Ranikhet), this is a book that marks the passage of time, especially the weight of the years, subtly but surely. If Roy records her early enchantment with the forested land that surrounds their home—her long walks through leopard-infested woods, tentative acquaintances with neighbours who couldn’t be farther from her life as a writer, and the many dogs who wiggle their way into her heart—she also chronicles her uncertain, often frustratingly slow, attempts at growing a garden as well as the grief of living through the covid years, when disease and death devastated loved ones in the plains.
Called by the Hills is a vault of memories where moments of joy and sorrow, epiphany and serendipity, remain frozen in time. As in her novels, Roy’s prose remains finely chiselled, lyrical but never sentimental, her luminous wit shining through the sentences, like sun light through a forest canopy on a wintry day. And yet, Called by the Hills is also enveloped in a layer of sadness. It starts as a gossamer mist of melancholy as Roy and her husband struggle to find their feet in the inclement new terrain, among strangers, away from the comforts of the city they have left behind. Goats munch on the lovingly planted saplings in their garden. Monkeys jump on to the tin roof at ungodly hours, waking them up, terrified that their home is falling apart.
As the years go by, the trepidation of being out siders in the hills, the niggling apprehension of being taken as “modern-day colonisers from the plains," congeals into a steady lament as the couple witness the hills falling victim to the forces of “development," worsened by climate change. Their beloved dog Jerry is taken by a leopard all of a sudden; a reclusive but charmingly eccentric neighbour dies of old age and a broken heart, bequeathing the lilies from his garden to Roy. Nature retaliates as incessant rain causes boulders to come crashing down on vehicles and trees collapse on homes.
If Roy conjures up a place that feels like a haven of tranquillity after the frenetic life of the city, she is also mindful how it can turn hostile and menacing when threatened by obdurate human greed. Nature writing has a long and illustrious antecedence, going back to the Romantic poets and beyond, mostly young men who gave a call to “return" to the English countryside under the onslaught of Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. Closer home, Rabindranath Tagore wrote some of his finest poems, as well as a series of letters addressed to his young niece Indira Devi Chaudhurani, during his peregrinations through rural Bengal.
Roy invokes another Bengali writer, Leela Majumdar (1908-2007), who grew up in Shillong, as her guiding light through her life in the hills. “As a writer," Roy writes, referring to Majumdar’s memoir of her childhood, Aar Konokhane (1967), “she reassured me that the rich and strange could be found at home, and that battles fought in flower beds were equal in importance to those fought on field." The truth of this statement rings through the book as the reader follows her, trying her luck at creating her garden out of the chaotic over growth in front of the cottage and, by extension, a home for herself in an odd new place. The locals scoff at Roy’s endeavours, mostly good-naturedly, assuring her that flowers bloom in their own sweet time; no amount of coercion can make them blossom earlier.
When she goes to buy saplings, she is co-opted into attending a bhoomi puja. As she is being led to the devotion site, Roy is struck by bathos of her situation: “The now familiar snow peaks ringed us, as if they were the best seats in an auditorium with heavenly spectators chuckling at the absurdity of a woman trying to buy plants at a government-run orchard."
Although Roy doesn’t anthropomorphise the natural world, she is never not aware of its looming pres ence, looking over her shoulders, while she is trying to defy the ele ments to grow her garden. The Him alayas stand tall, looking down on the vanities of tawdry human wishes, be it their desire to tame wilderness into profit-making enterprises or one woman’s resolve to grow sap lings and plants, many of them “illegal immigrants" gifted to her by friends from foreign lands (the passage leads to a moving digression on migration and globalisation).
Despite being repeatedly thwarted by vegetation, especially by the lime tree that stubbornly refuses to bear fruit, Roy’s need to forge a bond with the soil that nourishes and shelters her fam ily remains intensely human. In these moments of vulnerability, which extend to Roy’s capacious love for the strays, the reader glimpses a truth that no amount of touristy trips or bookish learning can give them access to. This is knowledge that can only be gleaned through lived experience, through meditative silence and slow time, requiring patience, perseverance and surrender.
While acknowledging her debt to several environmentalists, Roy writes about her friendship with three activist-writers in some detail—Shekhar Pathak (who was part of the Chipko Movement in the 1970s), Chandi Prasad Bhatt, and Bill Aitken. Especially about the last, Roy notes his “utter lack of machismo," despite being “a great trekker." “He travelled genially and light-heartedly, and with a deep, almost pantheistic response to the mountains," she observes. “He did not want to conquer the heights nor reach anywhere in record time." This is a sobering moment of recognition for Roy too—if not as an apprentice naturalist, then as a writer.
Living and working in relative isolation for the greater part of the year, she is cut off from the socioeconomic forces that fuel the business of publishing. Time, as she writes, in the hills is not a predictable dimension. Days may blur as one is trying to plug leaky roofs, or is lost in the absorbing ritual of making pottery, or simply lost in conversation with a visiting friend. Just as the mountains don’t care for the laws of the writerly life, especially of the publicity engine that runs it, most of Roy’s neighbours have little to say about the fact that she is a “writer" by profession. In her acknowledgement of this reality, there isn’t any grouse or martyrdom; only grati tude for it being so grounding. Compared to the deafening cacophony of promotions that city dwelling writers are drowned in, a writerly home in the hills feels like a blessing like no other.
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