POPULAR getting-to-know-you question: Do you prefer the mountains or the sea?

One of my earliest childhood memories is a single frame plucked from its reel. The action is lost, but the sensory drama remains. It is the resinous scent of early morning in Ranikhet, slanted gold on gravel, the drenched green of trees, the astringent taste of cold skies, birdsong, the corner of a mustard-coloured shawl. It’s the image that inevitably pops up in my mind’s eye when I listen to Cat Stevens’ Morning Has Broken.

My next visit to Kumaon came a quarter-century later. In between, I saw and loved many other hills: alpine slopes in Europe, Indonesian volcanoes, Kashmir, rough Ladakh, the wild majesty of Himachal Pradesh. For some years I had a serious affair with the sea, almost ran away with it, but ultimately realised that I’d be forever doomed to its margins. Besides, the sea creates an unnerving sense of pointless drift, while in the mountains you can take the world one bend at a time, without losing the view.

So, for what it’s worth, I’d pick the mountains.

When I returned to Kumaon, I decided that these are the loveliest hills of all, or at least the ones I feel most tenderly about. I was staying in a small cottage in Kausani, with rose bushes framing the door and my nose right up against the scalloped peak of Trishul and the Nanda Devi range. It was the end of October – pink-washed snowcaps, cool, sunny days spent reading on the verandah, and freezing starry nights with rum before the fireplace. A lady who stomps about the hills in a sari and gumboots, invited us to her house for tea and bread with honey. It all seemed to exist on the other side of the looking glass; I thought a lot about moving to the hills.

The following April I went up to Sitla Estate, where my friend Vikram Maira runs a guesthouse. The train to Kumaon is perfect: fall asleep in the heat and dust of Old Delhi, and wake up to a crisp dawn at Kathgodam station. Pull on a sweater. The taxi begins to climb immediately; stop for tea; wind along and feel the air cool even further within five minutes. Rhododendron bloodies the forests this time of year. The sun hits you in the face at every bend. Two and a half hours later you’re sitting under an ancient plum tree in full flower, eating a hearty breakfast and looking at an enormous line of snowcaps strung out in the sky like whiter-than-white washing.

Vikram used to be in advertising in Mumbai. One night, around a campfire in Corbett Park, he and his friends talked, as people do, about chucking it all up and moving to the hills. In the morning everyone went back to their lives, except Vikram. He flew to Mumbai, packed up his life, and two weeks later arrived in Sitla in the Nainital district of Kumaon, where his father owns an orchard adjoining a reserve forest. Vikram walked around the area, looked at the local architecture, and built a few rooms the traditional way, with mud and stone and small wooden windows. He looks after his guests personally, cooks for them and leads them on forest walks. He nurtures his orchard.

 

But the real difference in his life is that he’s not just visiting. He walks the hills, speaks the language, runs an informal school on his property for the local kids, is an active member of the community, is engaged with the local politics, and when he walks around the little post office and the bazaar in Mukteshwar, you can see the respect in people’s eyes. He’s driven sick people for two hours all the way to Haldwani in the middle of the night. His guests return again and again, his staff is loyal, he belongs to a people. He’s built a whole new life.

Lots of Kumaonis and Kumaon-lovers are in the tourism business, like Vikram and like Bob who runs Bob’s Place down the road in Nathuakhan, where I once sat for three luxurious days just watching rain pelt down on the flowering pears, and mist snaking its way through the cedars. The mark of a successful tourism business is that it blends into the hills, instead of sticking out like a sore thumb. But it’s a difficult line to walk, between an operation that showcases Kumaon without wearing it out, and an operation that strains the resources without giving anything back, filling the hills with diesel fumes and vacationers who don’t allow travel to move them in any way, clutching the paradigms and expectations of their own daily lives close to their bosoms at all times.

 

Next to Vikram’s property live Mr and Mrs Lal. Their garden is a lovingly tended riot of colours, including a huge purple wisteria. I sat under a tree sipping their mulled wine, and listened to the story of how the leopard prowls around in the garden at night, so they have to keep their dog indoors. The Lals enjoy their life in the hills too, but not as spectators. They moved here about twenty years ago to set up an NGO called Chirag, which works on health, education, income-generation, that sort of thing. Their aim is to make themselves redundant.

Kumaon needs that kind of commitment. It’s one thing to be there as a tourist admiring the pretty scenes, and quite another to be there as a resident facing the reality of life in the hills – water scarcity, bad roads, poor communications, and the physical demands of the terrain. Women walk for kilometres for a bucket of water. They spend hours in the forest cutting and carrying wood to burn in the bitter winter.

I am blessed to be able to walk in the forest for pleasure. On all my visits to Sitla I’ve trekked through the reserve forest with Vikram, who knows every dip and rise and animal trail like the back of his hand. The forest is his domain: he has walked into it at night, dug himself into a foxhole, and sat up to spot leopards and other wildlife. Despite my perfectly genuine love of animals, I’m too chicken to do that; but I love to walk during the day, like on the oak forest trail from Ora Khan, a little up the road from Nathuakhan, upto Sitla; or up the stone-flagged forest trail from Sitla to Mukteshwar; and through pine forests around Kausani, watching the Himalayan magpies and pheasants.

 

One of the most beautiful forests I’ve ever seen is around Jageshwar, the cluster of 124 temples built between the 8th and 18th centuries that lies within an exquisite grove of wide-limbed cedars along the Almora-Pithoragarh road. I followed a creek in that forest, collecting leeches between my toes, into a mossy enchantment full of birdsong and fresh, springy grass. Jageshwar is one of the twelve jyotirlingas in India. It’s too bad that every religious shrine in India seems to accrete garbage and noise and tubelights and loudspeakers and metal railings. It takes a considerable act of imagination to recreate the serenity of worship here, to step into a cool stone chamber a thousand years old and pretend you don’t see the powder-blue metal shelves leaning against the wall.

A few years ago, during the monsoon, I drove all over Kumaon to do a story on its medieval temples. Scenes from that journey have stayed with me like that childhood memory of Ranikhet: the evening aarti at Nainital’s Naina Devi temple in a chilling rain; driving to Almorah in a mist that made ghosts out of every bend to see the 14th century Nanda Devi temple; the Indiana Jones-like complex of the 12th century Bara Aditya sun temple at Katarmal, in which you wander on tiptoes, trying not to awaken any superpowers grumpier than the ASI caretaker; the shrine to Gollu devata, the most popular deity in these hills, at Chaiti, hung with thousands of bells.

I remember the summery light in Dwarhat, where 10th-12th century temples sit all over the settlement, suffering the laundry drying on them like good-tempered dogs putting up with some tail-pulling; the exquisite Sri Baleshwar temple at Champawat, where an old lady grabbed my hand and spontaneously married me off, tikka and all, to my fiancé who was travelling with me. At Devidhura there’s an atmospheric little shrine nestling between two enormous boulders, magical even though it’s lined with bathroom tiles. The Bagnath temple at Bageshwar, with its ancient Nandi, is a thousand-year-old bubble of peace and beauty not fifty metres from Vikas Shopping Centre.

 

Faith carries even septuagenarians and couch potatoes on a nearly month-long journey from Pithoragarh district to Mount Kailash in the Tethys Himalaya region. A circumambulation of this peak, and of the sapphire-blue Manasarovar lake that is said to have sprung from Brahma’s brow, is a step towards getting off the rebirth merry-go-round. From Mangti and Malpa by the Kali river, to Kalapani, over the Lipulekh Pass, and onward to Taklakot in Tibet, they walk, or ride ponies, or stumble along on the arm of a companion. Dying on this journey, one of the great pilgrimages of the world, only makes you more worthy of heaven.

I’m a godless heathen if there ever was one. If I really had to pick a religion, it would probably be animism, but in the meantime I’m perfectly happy just to feel an October evening breeze, or smell a pine tree, or watch the clouds make funny shapes in the sky, or a spider busily weave its web in the bushes, and thank Creation for creating all of it.

 

In the mountains, however, I better appreciate why people worship the blue-throated ascetic who lives in the Great Himalaya. It’s odd that in the land named after the Kurmavatar, the tortoise incarnation of Vishnu, they’re largely Shiva bhakts, but either way, you’d be an idiot not to greatly respect the high mountains, where the breath is crushed from your lungs and the blood frozen in your veins, and where placing a foot wrong could doom you for all eternity.

For my part I’d much rather sit here in the more clement Lesser Himalaya, thrive on the bounty of the Kosi, Gomti, Saryu, and Ramganga rivers, and enjoy the excellent view of those beautiful distant white fangs. Between six and eight thousand feet or so, I find, is a wonderful altitude to stick to. It’s the optimum height for fresh, cool air that is still oxygen-rich. It’s the height at which your metabolism wakes up and wants to be fed, and coincidentally the altitude at which the soil produces apples, pears, apricots, peaches and walnuts on which to feed. It’s also the altitude that, for the same reasons, triggers all kinds of creative juices. It seems the perfect place to sit and write whatever opus happens to be festering in you; Ramgarh did good things for Rabindranath Tagore and Mahadevi Verma, so why not for me?

And it’s at that altitude in Kumaon that I’ve made so many new memories. Wind-tossed dusk skies at Majkhali, the last light turning leaves neon green and the wind cleaning the air like a sheet of glass. A lunch of cheese and crackers on a shining patch of pine needles in the shade of the forest. Stopping to stretch my legs on the road in the Binsar sanctuary on a moonless night, trying to see like a leopard, scared to death of running into one. Driving along the lonely, treacherous road to Champawat, where there is sometimes only a few inches’ leeway between a rock and a long way down. Lying in a huge meadow hidden in a forest with the sun on my back and my chin propped in the scented grass, watching insects and buzzing bees and remembering what my father, who worked like a demon all his life and therefore knew the value of relaxation, urged in a letter: ‘Remember always, in your life, to watch the bhauras.’

 

There’s a light that I think of as particularly Kumaoni – an early evening phenomenon that photographers call crossover light. That’s when you can see silhouettes as well as detail, colour as well as light and shade. It’s the time when the birds are nestling down for the night. Occasionally you’ll see someone walking home with that distinctive hill gait: chin only slightly lowered, shoulders straight, hands held behind the back, a slow and steady pace. (It’s a gait that the average city slicker might be tempted to romanticise – ‘gritty yet contented’ – but as it happens, it’s the least tiring way of hauling yourself over steep terrain.)

This light, which I love, always makes me think admiringly of Carpet Sahib. Maneaters of Kumaon turns out to be two completely different books when read at home in Delhi, and on the road in Mukteshwar or Champawat where your imagination can conjure a pair of big yellow eyes in every dark bush, and a heavy furred paw in the sound of every rustling leaf. It’s more or less certain that at some point in Kumaon, when you’re sitting in a deeper-than-black night illuminated by a small and unequal fire, you will remember, or be told, the story of the leopard that silently abducted the man sitting right next to the narrator; or the leopard who walked over forty juicy sheep to get to the little shepherd huddling in the corner; or the tigress who savaged an entire village.

Driving along twilit mountain roads I inevitably think of Jim Corbett, undertaking foot marches over several days from his home in Nainital to wherever a maneater lurked. It’s difficult to fully appreciate what Corbett was all about until you’ve been on foot in a jungle at night yourself. I once walked along a dry riverbed in Manas National Park in Assam, in the blackest of nights, and may never quite recover – and that was in a jungle where the carnivores eat what they’re supposed to. I visited the nighttime sets of a film being shot in Corbett Park, and spent the entire night looking over my shoulder despite everything I know about animal behaviour.

But thank god that there are still tigers and leopards here. From the time of the Kols and the Khasas, through the reign of the Katyuris and the Chands, the Gorkhas and the British, and the freedom movement, Kumaon has remained in many ways a small place struggling with the price of its unreal beauty. It’s a delicate beauty. Thank god that the hills have been carved away from the desperate mess of the Uttar Pradesh plains. Tourism is a viable way to improve the life of the ordinary Kumaoni, and we have the opportunity to do it carefully and well. Towns like Almorah and Nainital are a warning for both how desperate the need for development is, as well as how badly it can be done.

Everyone who visits Kumaon comes away feeling as if it is somehow theirs; I do, even as a superficial occasional visitor. I’d love to believe that this beautiful part of my country will remain special, and not just in my memory.