Nightmares and Dreamy Backyards

Our neighbour: courtesy Barun Mitra

First the brokers came.

Then the nightmares.

We lived in a clearing in the forest, our stone barn a witness to nature, as much as a refuge from it. We marked the passing of the days by the light of the moon. When it waxed, it was eloquent in the silvery undersides of oak leaves, in the prancing shadows of the old utees tree.

In April, you could watch thunderstorms gather in the northern valleys, darkening as they raced over Almora, giving you just enough time to gather your drying clothes and bring them into the house. By late May, the green faded to a tiny patch of grass under the pear tree, where Kedar had his first lessons in practical science, in siphons that rained delightful showers of cool water, and balloons that whizzed around us in arcs of pink and yellow. Even the leeches that feasted on our dogs and us in July were a testament to nature’s embrace of our charmed life.

In autumn, when the sun broke through monsoon cobwebs, and all was light and gold, we walked on rich leaf litter through fields and forests that could, for all the world, be our own.

But, of course they weren’t. The Brahmin families who owned most of the land had long abandoned these hillsides, and gone to the plains in search of employment and the conveniences of city life. The land passed from one generation to another, but only in title; ownership was never asserted by presence. The contours of fields had softened and disappeared; trees were hacked for fodder and firewood by the poor farmers from the neighbouring village of Kaphura, and their goats grazed the shrubs till the terraces were bare and sandy.

We had bought the land in 1991, and until the turn of the century, we never saw a new face on the hillside. A few years later, on a rank of terraces we often slipped down, fencing went up around a long-abandoned home, a gate was erected, and the old stone pile received a lick of paint.

City folk were moving in. Just over the ridge, the vast Sonapani Estate saw its first new bricks in fifty years, and a small clutch of cottages became an ‘eco-resort’ for tourists willing to trudge a couple of kilometres along the ridge. Our little village of Satoli was emerging as a dot on the tourist map. From neighbouring Chhatola, young Kapil sniffed an opportunity to transact some land, and tramped the hillside, matching squiggles on the patwari’s maps with owners and their descendants,

The brokers were moving in, and Premila began having nightmares. Of disappearing trees, and neighbours peeping into our backyard. She vilified the brokers, and transmitted her worst fears to me. In the minutes before I woke, I would see myself trudging up a hillside scoured by dusty lanes and pock-marked with squalor, struggling to identify the boundaries of our patch of land.

It took a while for me to realise the obvious - that the brokers were looking for buyers, and that included us. Over the next five years, even as we shifted base to the city, we bought neighbouring pieces of land as they came on offer. The first such took a leap of faith, separated from our garden by several terraces and a meadow whose owners were still unidentified. But with each transaction, each visit to the registrar’s court in Nainital, every set of fingers smudged with ink that marked my identity on the documents of sale, the jigsaw filled itself in.

The nightmares receded, and the work began, of mapping the land and fencing it. Of asserting ownership and excluding goats. Of shoring up terraces with meter upon meter of retaining walls, tons upon tons of brittle stone, cut by hand from micro-quarries on the land, each little excavation filled in with soil, and replaced by a young tree.

Up and down the hillside, and all along the road from Satoli to Satkhol, down the long, winding road into the valley of Chhatola, up into the tight cluster of Sitla, land was transacted, and concrete was poured. Concrete that rumbled up from the plains, and countless hairpins of ribbed steel, acres and acres of glass, for those famous views of the Kumaon. The makings of second homes of the city rich, and of humble homestays for weekend getaways.

The nightmare was here, not at night, but in the harsh light of May, when schools are out, and the honking automobiles of our burgeoning GDP look for a breath of fresh air with a faint hint of cool. When every roadside view point is littered with chips packets and crushed cans emptied of beer.

Two nights ago, our old friend Barun, who lives in a picturesque cottage at the edge of our property, sent me a picture of the lights at the bottom of our valley. “When I first came here, twenty five years ago, the only lights you saw were in Almora. And now, this is the village of Diyari”.

I shrugged back an emoji - Progress.

But then, he sent me this picture of a barking deer he had spotted earlier that evening, when the sun had just begun to soften in the west. The young trees we had planted two decades ago are now strapping guardians of our slopes, their neighbours born of seed wafted over the hillside by mountain winds. From our garden, we can no longer see Barun and Madhumita’s home, the new forest licks up and out to the west, a long, dense finger of leaf green and birdsong.

And, we now believe, a family of barking deer, who have found refuge in this little oasis of green that was conjured up by our fears.

The nightmare lives, and grows, around us, and admits of no intercession. But, whenever you grasp at a chance, you can insert a tiny dream of green into it. And, if you are lucky, the occasional golden flash of a passing deer.