A Home Less Ordinary

With honesty, humour and literary grace, Anuradha Roy's new memoir traces her shift to the hills of Ranikhet, and replaces the dream of pastoral bliss with something tougher, truer, and more deeply earned

- BY Aditya Mani Jha

IN ANURADHA ROY'S second novel The Folded Earth (2011), there's a line that reads “The mountains do not reveal themselves to people who come here merely to escape the heat of the plains.” The line makes a clear distinction between vacationers and true mountain-dwellers. Roy's new memoir Called by the Hills is the story of how she and her partner Rukun moved from the former to the latter category, setting up their new lives in a small hut at Ranikhet, a hill station and former cantonment town in Uttarakhand's Kumaon region. Along the way, the two also set up their own independent publishing house Permanent Black (2000-present day), working remotely at a time when Internet infrastructure wasn’t as widespread as it is today.

Roy, previously shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize for her novel