The beauty and sadness of living in the hills

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

- Somak Ghoshal

A watercolour illustration by the writer

(COURTESY ANURADHA ROY)

Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills, her first book-length work of nonfiction, 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.