Mists had filled the valley, and little hilltops peeped out like islands in a vast lake. He peered into the horizon, thought he could discern the Himal within the streaks of violet cloud, already flecked with the early light of the sun. The moka pot bubbled on the stove, fragrant with the promise of rich, brewed coffee.
He settled in his chair, balanced the cup on the armrest, nudged the remote to produce the Bloomberg channel on the screen hanging from the lofted timbers. The stock ticker paraded US stock prices, largely in the green, a magpie chattered under the oak, and the coffee, thick and dark, was a testament to the growers at Attikan estate. If he strolled out into the meadow, Trishul would now have revealed itself, the western guardian of Nanda Devi. To its left, Nanda Ghungti, pleated and furled like a snowy veil captured in mid-flight.
All was right with the world.
As the cosmos had promised him, that April morning in Ranikhet decades ago, when he stood contemplating life in the mountains to come. A disc of light had risen from within, erasing the darkness of his shut eyes, flooding his being with warmth.
That afternoon, they had moved their books to this home on the hill. The puppy nosed inside the cardboard boxes as they were unpacked, and motes of dust played in the late evening light. The pear tree outside the window was scarcely a shrub then, and the terraces off to the west were trodden by goats. By late summer, they would be grazed down to dusty patches of shrubland, and in the first rains, turn to mudslides that buried the remaining fragments of green.
We must save these slopes, he would intone over the years, a prayer, a dream…
Meanwhile, there was the Devbhoomi to explore, the million folds of valley and myth. The bugyals, bursting with monsoon flowers, the cavern of ice from which the Ganga sprung. The rocky paths they climbed, the unnamed springs from which they had drunk, the streams in which their child had played, as they made these hillsides their home.
The coffee was cold, the screen still relaying studio images from eight thousand miles away. He turned it off, walked to the kitchen for a refill, catching a glimpse of Almora from the window.
Almora, 1998.
They had stopped at Joshi Communications Center to pick up faxes. Nothing consequential.
“Been on a yatra?” Joshi asked, as the stubble and the muddy trekking boots suggested.
“The last two of the Panch-Kedar.”
Joshi looked blank.
“There are five Kedar temples - Kedarnath is famous, but there are four others, which share the legend.”
“You know more about devbhoomi than any of us.”
“We now qualify as pahadis.”
“Never”, said as a matter of fact.
Uttarakhand had been carved out as a hill-state from the nation-sized Uttar Pradesh in 2001, and by 2004, had instituted laws that restricted the purchase of land by ‘outsiders’. This, they were not, having settled on this hillside when it was still a remote corner of Uttar Pradesh, and having witnessed the birth of Uttarakhand as insiders. In the eyes of the law, they were Uttarakhandis.
They didn’t need that label to proclaim their love of these forests, of the light that filtered through cobwebs in the early autumn, of the barking deer with the gleaming hide, of the scrubland they had rescued, of the springs they had channelled into a waterbody of lilies.
He cupped the fresh coffee in his palms, looked out at the deodar, slowly beginning to acquire gravitas after thirty years in the soil, on to the young chestnut marking the far end of the meadow. Tried to shut out the images of devastation on the ridge above, of oaks and rhododendron felled with abandon, of a contractor and his bulldozers gone rogue.
Of course the road must be built, they had protested to the district authorities. But surely the forest department would not have signed off on this wilful decimation. They hadn’t, and now the contractor needed to deflect attention. Non-pahadis like them were against development, he rallied a counter-protest, which found traction in the local press.
And now there was to be an official inquiry. Not into the trees felled, or the private lands bulldozed without process. Into the motives of these outsiders, these people who would never qualify as pahadis.
The official party came up the hill just after nine, led by a trim, balding young man, in an unzipped fleece jacket, jeans and sturdy walking shoes, khaki files peeping out of an orange shopping bag from a Haldwani saree shop. He waited at the crest of the slope for his seniors to appear, first a paunchy man in his late thirties, the white front of his shirt startling in the mountain sun, his thick-soled sneakers fresh off a showroom shelf. Behind him, in no particular hurry, a grizzled older man, in a fading pink shirt and a well-worn green jacket that spoke of many miles in many forests.
“Aiye!” Please come - they heard from the shade of a deodar. They took in the rough-hewn Shiva temple on the terrace behind, a rusty iron trishul planted into the flagstones at its entrance. Their host sat cross-legged on a low stone platform, the remains of a fire smouldering in a shallow earthen pit at its base. Dressed in dhoti and kurta of earthen hue, he motioned them to the stone benches that flanked the pit.
“Aap ki kyaa khaatir ki jai?”. What may I do for you? He turned a glowing coal over with a well-used pair of iron tongs, and gestured broadly, his large hands taking in the fire-pit, the temple, a chillum that lay discarded in a corner. The young man held the shopping bag to his chest, and looked at his seniors. They looked at each other and lowered themselves to a bench.
“For a genuine dhuni, you need a deodar”, he looked at each of them in turn.
“I planted this the day we did the bhoomi-puja for this house”, he waved at the home without taking his eyes off them. The paunchy man nodded.
“On a clear day, you get a darshan of the Trishul peak from this very spot.” They all turned to the north.
“So you’re all from the forest department”.
Looking at the oldest of the group, “You’ve clearly seen many forests - when you have the time, I invite you to take a walk around our forest. Forty two species. Many he’s probably never seen before.” The man in question smiled weakly, crossed his feet in their shiny sneakers.
The young man stopped fingering the files inside their shopping bag.
“You had some questions for me, I believe? Please…”
“Er, no,” The fat man had a reedy voice, “We were told to file a report into the complaints, and, er, decided to come to the location.”
“That’s the right thing to do. Babu-log, clerks, can write the reports. But if the Dev-bhoomi is to be preserved, it will be thanks to hard-working foresters like yourselves.”
He tapped the tongs on the rim of the pit, put them down, and stood. His seated guests followed.
“Would you like me to show you the way to the felled trees?”
“I’ve been there before”, the elder man spoke, pointing through the forest to the ridge- top.
“Om Namah Shivay”, he nodded to them, and watched them leave.
It was almost nine-thirty. Trading would be well under way in Indian equity markets. He picked up the remote as he took his sandals off in the doorway. By the time he took his chair, the screen was displaying the Zerodha site. Adani stocks were edging up, after news from a US court had sent them reeling yesterday.