You wake up one morning and realise that you have been magically transported to the quaint hills where all the popular writers reside. You ae reminded of the Ruskin Bond-esque narratives where the characters witness upside-down ghosts during long, solitary walks in the hillside. You read poetry while it snows outside, sip piping-hot ginger tea and breathe in the refreshing aroma as the mist slowly rises. The buransh (rhododendron) greets you with a smile, the songs of Ghughuti become your lullaby and the enchanting sight of the Himalayas serves as your perpetual muse.
Life in the hills seems like a gratifying deal, making a writer/ painter/ artist/ adventurer out of you, promising a lifetime of solace and wonderment. You have been fed on multiple narratives about what life in the hills is like through popular tales, cinema and literature.
Having been born and brought up in the tiny hill town of Chamba (Tehri) in Uttarakhand, I am familiar with the hill life. However, it was when I shifted to Delhi to pursue my higher education that the normality of this “ pahari life” was shaken. The oft-used hill vocabulary of “above the road” and “beneath the road” does not exist here; routine rice-eating during the day is not customary in the plains of northern India and life without ACs, coolers and fans is practically unimaginable.
As a student in Delhi University, there were many instances when my classmates would inquire, “Do you have Internet connection there?” or “Are your houses built slanted?” In the beginning, I would respond with a frown but I realised gradually that the geography of the place where I come from is the reason for their curiosity. I was their pahari classmate, the one from the pahar, a place with a different topography compared to theirs.
Mornings are the most exquisite as well as the most difficult time of the day for those in the hills. The sweepers, milkmen/women, newspaper-sellers/paperboys and farmers begin their day with dedication, wrapped in warm shawls and fluffy jackets/coats. However, there is more to living in the hills than the picturesque visuals in the popular imagination.
Travelling in the hills during the monsoon is an extremely dangerous proposition, which is the everyday reality of people here. Lives are lost in landslides. Those whose work requires them to travel through the hills on a daily basis face great risk. The vehicles making their way through the mountains are threatened by the possibility of rocks breaking away from the hills. The Uttarakhand floods of 2013 were a catastrophe.
And yet, despite the vagaries of the hill life, one feels deeply for the place one has left behind. For those of us who have spent childhood in the hills, the increasing awareness of gradual exploitation of mountains, the loss of our favourite spots and the slow erasure of the storehouse of our memories are strongly felt.
Distance provides hope, meaning and purpose. Time and again, we raise voices, engage in acts like planting trees and cleanliness drives, and, sometimes, we write poems, stories and articles. In that process, we capture even the tiniest of memories like the berries — kaafal, hissar or kilmore — growing on the hillside. Lost spaces like the submerged town of Tehri (replaced by the gigantic Tehri dam) live on in memories.
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