The author Anand Sankar with local residents and his wife Shubhra.
Credit: Anand Sankar
My wife Shubhra Chatterji and I had just moved into our new home. There were 101 things pending on our to-do list when that niggling doubt raised its head again. Did we make the right decision to move to a remote village in the mountains? I had left Bengaluru and she, Mumbai.
It was the spring of 2021. I was having lunch with guests of my tourism company outside our home. The next moment, I was lying on the floor, crying in pain. Something had gone horribly wrong in my spine. Trained in first aid, I knew this needed emergency care. But the closest hospital was 200 km away in the city of Dehradun and the village had no ambulance. The doctor on the phone told me to rest until the swelling in my back subsided. Painkillers we ordered arrived the next morning and I made it to the hospital 10 days later.
His home during the snowfall in 2021
Credit: Anand Sankar
The personal health crisis busted any notions that I might have harboured of an idyllic mountain life.
I live in Kotgaon, a village nestled 1,800 metre high in the upper Tons Valley in Uttarakhand. There’s no clinic here. Villagers treat fevers, pains and wounds at home. When things get serious, say, in case of a septic infection, some locals have to carry patients on their shoulders to the road and then drive 27 km to the nearest Primary Health Centre. Roads exist — if you can call them roads. They are narrow, steep and winding. Jeeps and buses rumble and grumble as they move on them.
Finding my lifeline
To my knowledge, my wife and I are the only city folks living among 25,000-odd people in Mori tehsil, under which Kotgaon falls. We didn’t come here to retire. We are in our early 40s. We are not the sort who were fed up with traffic, pollution and the malls. Our crossover to the mountains was gradual.
He lives with three mountain dogs and a cat.
Credit: Anand Sankar
I worked as a journalist for close to a decade, first in Bengaluru, then in Delhi. Living in Delhi meant I could head out to the Himalayas often, and in 2013, I trekked to Kalap in the upper Tons Valley. I had met villagers from Kalap in Dehradun through mutual acquaintances. I saw that the village belonged in a different era. It had no road, no clinic, no telephone, no Internet. On a subsequent visit, a 70-year-old woman fell at my feet when I offered her a paracetamol tablet from my backpack. She was running a fever.
This got me thinking. Could I help remote villages transform while making a career for myself as a social entrepreneur? I knew storytelling. I loved the outdoors. I quit full-time journalism and set up a non-profit to provide education, healthcare and livelihood opportunities in Kalap and adjoining villages. But I did not move to Kalap.
Until 2015, there was no mobile phone network in the Valley, home to 37 villages, all scattered afar and sparsely populated. Many villages didn’t have roads and, thus, no postal service. So I settled down in the nearest city, Dehradun. I would holler at taxi and bus drivers plying the route to send messages to my field staff. Or hand over chits with messages like ‘Call me from landline at 3 pm’. I would travel up the hills two or three times a month.
In 2020, the lifeline that I needed not just to live but also to make a living in a mountain village — a reliable Internet connection — became available. And I decided
to shift up. I chose Kotgaon over Kalap because the former at least had a motorable approach road. The villages are perched on two sides of a valley, 6 km apart.
Why was I sacrificing a stable career and a comfortable city life? My family was upset and my friends were confused. Being able to make a decent living was my top concern then, as it is now.
There is no income stability here. And I keep dashing back to Dehradun in my car to reboot my diesel generator, buy switchboards, fix my phone screen when it cracks, or get my root canal treatment done. The cost of to and fro is significant, about Rs 15,000 per month.
Do-it-yourself life
I was serious about assimilating into the village, which has over 100 farming families. When they saw me walking uphill with a 25 kg bag of things on my back, it earned me their respect early on.
Mountain life is fraught with uncertainties. Stocking the store room with dry ration and filling drums with water is our biggest fixation. I drive down to Dehradun to get two months’ supply of groceries for ourselves and pet food. I pick up enough milk cartons. Having cows in our backyard doesn’t mean we have an unlimited supply of fresh milk. Remember they produce milk only when pregnant?
In the first year I shed 9.5 kg. Not being able to order a masala dosa or chips online was inconvenient, but soon we were making meals with seasonal ferns, foraged mushrooms, and local produce like chad dhan red rice, tartary buckwheat seeds, emmer wheat flour, plum vinegar, and bhanjira pisyun-loon (spiced salt). Farmers we work with ensure our pantry is never empty. We rustle up saag, sambhar and even pizzas. Families nearby send in buttermilk on occasion.
Adaptability is key when you live in the back of beyond. I often tell people the umbilical cord that ties me to the mountains is a wireless broadband connection. The signal hops by radio for almost 150 km over the mountains before it reaches my home and office, which are 500 metres apart. Since I am the major subscriber of broadband in the Valley (hotels come next), I had to instal the last mile of the network myself. I am a computer science graduate and I put my rusty knowledge of telecom networking to design a solar grid to power it.
I also put to use a hack I had read online. We keep a pot of water simmering on the wooden stove overnight. This helps keep the home warm in winters.
Here, money alone can’t buy an electricity connection. I had to find the electric pole nearest to my house, buy the power transmission cable and hook it up with my house! Ditto for water. I had to find out the nearest water line and conduct complex negotiations to get my share. How do you convince someone to let a wire or a pipe pass through their land as an outsider? You involve two or three others who would benefit from this friendly gesture. This increases your bargaining power.
The sense of community is also born out of necessity. We only have one another to lug cement bags from the road, till our lands, harvest our crops, and conduct cremations.
Snow and shrooms
The hard work of putting all these things in place was worth it. It has earned me sweeping views of the Himalayas and fields dancing in the breeze. I enjoy crisp air, dewy grass, birdsong, the bleating of goats, and the smell of firewood. And I sleep under the bright band of the Milky Way for five months in a year.
A winter worshipper like me can’t describe in words the joy of seeing the first snowfall from my own home in the mountains. This was in February 2021, the last time the Valley had timely and blinding snowfall. But Shubhra and I did not run out and say thanks for the blessing. We knew better. We stood by the window, clicked 200-300 photos and videos, and returned to the fireplace to worry about what comes in the wake of snowfall. Winters here are frigid. They can block our paths for up to three days, snap electricity lines, crash trees, and freeze the flow of water.
A home is made by those who make it. One snowbound morning, two puppies showed up at our door, out of nowhere. We named them after local mushrooms, Gucchi and Chyun. We rescued a mange-infested puppy from a local market where traders are called Lala, and we named him Lala. The word that ‘city people’ were nursing a dying dog spread. Today, our handsome Lala has a following locally and on social media. Local youth approach me to help treat injured animals and get them vaccinated. Simba, the cat, has been by my side since my Bengaluru days.
Shubhra and I make sure to spend winters in Kotgaon. She lives mostly in Mumbai making films. January is tyohar (festival) time here when residents worship local deities, sing and dance to Pahadi songs, and drink homemade alcohol for a week. It is downtime as there’s no work in the fields. We are atheists but we love the community bonding by the bonfire. Locals also turn up for funerals and childbirth no matter what. And if a family prints wedding invites and sends you one, you must go.
We coped better than city denizens during the Covid-19 pandemic. We would go for picnics by the river and stroll among glorious rhododendrons and majestic oaks. When city folks were scrambling for OTPs to get their vaccine shots, medical teams were knocking on our doors and giving us ours. Villagers took the vaccine readily but not before chiding the nurses, ‘Do whatever but don’t threaten us with quarantine’. When urban people were attacking frontline workers, the villagers were organising langars (communal meals) for healthcare and other officials who would trek up the hills to create awareness.
Thanks to ‘the umbilical connection to the world’, we unlocked the true potential of the village economy during the pandemic. Farmers feared visiting the wholesale market in Dehradun to sell their apples. My non-profit made an online appeal to the city folk to order directly from them. We had a modest goal of selling 400 kg — we ended up dispatching 40,000 kg to 18 cities.
If, but, why
Walking my dogs and watching movies in bed with my cat is my idea of unwinding here. I turn in by 9 or 10 pm. Once the daylight fades, pin-drop silence lulls me to sleep.
Do I miss city life? It has been a decade since I attended a play or a concert and I am never able to sync my city stopovers with cultural gigs. I like trying out different cuisines and having a multi-course meal at a fancy restaurant. I plan this seriously whether I am visiting Dehradun once a month for banking or flying to Bengaluru or Mumbai for a break. I like movies and ‘Dune 2’ was the last I saw in a theatre.
Other mountain migrants like me crave friends, hobby classes, cafes, museums and handicraft markets. Gorging on croissants and sushi is high on their to-do lists. But the truth is that we have little time for indulgences. We have to catch up with family and friends, sort out banking papers and get the car serviced. Also lined up are medical checkups and haircuts, and we have to buy coffee and cheese, and sometimes, our favourite wine or beer.
So why do we keep going back to the mountains? I asked Neha Sumitran and Vahishta Mistry. Having grown up in humid cities like Mumbai and Chennai, the couple dreamed of a place where “sweating was optional” and Kodaikanal fit the bill. They are pursuing regenerative farming and designing alternative energy systems and they love “the beautiful relationship” they have formed with the earth.
Kriti Bisht grew up in Haridwar in Uttarakhand and Ashish Godara hails from Suratgarh, Rajasthan. The couple has moved to Basgaon, a village in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand. It was Ashish’s idea — he felt he wasn’t up for fast city life. They are doing permaculture and farming, running a homestay, and selling naturally dyed apparel.
They know of a couple or two who returned to the city after experiencing the mountain life. That happens, they believe, when we force “the city hustle on rural life”. But the two have adapted to the pace of life in Basgaon, where “nothing happens on time” and not much happens during the winters.
I came to Kotgaon to make a difference to the local community and I think that makes me stick around. Today, my Tons Valley Shop helps about 450 farmers find new markets. My Tons Trails offers sustainable tourism in seven villages. But my non-profit Kalap Trust had to discontinue the charitable health centre after the pandemic — we don’t have funds.
Surely, the lure of city life is there. I do think of the career opportunities I let go. Our parents can’t visit us because of the remoteness and lack of access to emergency healthcare. We don’t have a veterinary hospital for our pets nearby. My spine acts up once in a while and my forever cold feet are a reminder that winter feels colder with age.
But I have lost the instinct to survive in a city. I can’t cross Bengaluru roads. I have become used to clean air. My taps won’t run out of water even if I keep them open all day. My dogs have an entire valley to leap in. My mountain home is ideal for an asocial person like me. It is hidden in the wilderness. There are no nosy neighbours to ask us why we haven’t painted our home yet.
Like this story? Email: dhonsat@deccanherald.co.in