Anjana Basu
The gift wrapping flowers at your fingertips as you tear the cello tape to release the book. The cover flowers, botanic illustrations, monkeys and a plethora of postcards tucked under the back flap. This is a book that calls out to be judged by the cover — or at any rate Hachette marketing has made it so. Inside the eye wanders to the botanical brushstrokes, misty hills, cottages, flowering shrubs and more — with occasionally a dog, the creation of the writer. Called by the Hills is Anuradha Roy’s account of moving to Ranikhet and setting up a home in the Himalaya.
There have been others in this genre — Rumer Godden’s Rungli-Rungliot for example which talked about moving bungalows with dogs and family, and I. Allan Sealy’s The Small Wild Goose Pagoda. All of these held the enchantment of the hills and getting to grips with the land and its flowers. Roy’s first work of non-fiction — a memoir — talks about a decision to move on an impulse to the hills enchanted by the vision of a line of silvery peaks on the horizon. She has visions of living in a world of perfect tranquillity setting up her own wild garden and helping her husband run their publishing house from the relative wilderness.
In common with Rumer Godden and I. Allan Sealy, she recounts the difficulties — in her case problems of connecting to the outer world through laptops which was vital for their business and planting a blooming wilderness against the will of her housekeeper, known as the Ancient who felt that memsahibs needed to grow rigidly disciplined gardens in straight lines.
More than the mountains, Roy talks about her struggles with the earth, resistant saplings, a lemon tree that refuses to bear fruit, and more. She also notes that despite being veiled in tranquillity, there are human predators determined to take all they can of nature and ultimately ruin its beauty with greed. Occasionally she quotes from Leela Majumdar’s memoir where the author as a child had similar tussles with seeds until her mother taught her that everything takes its own time. She talks about “illegal immigrants” — the foreign seeds that she brings from her friends abroad and plants while being aware that many of them may not be good for the natives plants and animals and that science has proved that such invasions are harmful.
Called by the Hills does not move in a straight sweep like Rumer Godden’s setting up house in the tea gardens. The problems of renovating the house are glossed over barring the electricity and laptop issues. Roy strings together various anecdotes to make a bouquet of events. Many of them have appeared in fragments in newspapers, so some readers may find them familiar. She writes about her dogs and the problems of strays, and most importantly in a place like Ranikhet saving them from becoming leopard bait and starvation during COVID.
Unlike Ruskin Bond, Roy’s love of the hills is not unqualified. She sees the monsoons as a season of stoicism — life in the hills, in fact, despite the wild beauty all around demands a certain acceptance from all those who live there. Nature has become enraged as a result of climate change and her wrath can be seen in storms and landslides which make everyone fearful for their lives. And yes, a beloved dog can be snatched by a leopard which is always a threat in the hills where predators stalk amongst the beauty of birds and flowers.
Roy’s poetic meandering also covers her work as a writer, the residencies she is forced to attend while pining for her husband and dogs and her “dog eared” workspace. She talks about the people she meets and the way of life — her trips to discover berries and explore possibilities of making jam from them. Both she and Bond are threatened by the possibilities that development will spoil the natural beauty of the region but there is nothing that either of them can do to prevent it. To comfort herself she harks back to past histories and the kindness of communities which still exists.
The book is slow moving — as life in the hills very often is, and Roy lingers over the details. Called by the Hills is written in a style very different from Anuradha Roy’s fiction, though no less well crafted — a more personal and more fluid style that is easy to relate to without undue layering. Roy’s botanical art flowers on every page, adding colour to her stories and then a set of postcards, bloom as an extra burst of colour for the reader.
Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya can be ordered here.
Born in Allahabad, schooled for a time in the UK, Anjana Basu has to date published ten novels and two books of poetry. Her novel Curses in Ivory was published by HarperCollins in 2003. In 2004, she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland where she worked on her second novel, Black Tongue, published by Roli in 2007. She began writing for children in 2010 when Roli brought out Chinku and the Wolfboy. Her Jim Corbett’s ghost series for TERI deals with big cat conservation for children—the fourth in the series, Hide and Seek Tiger, was published in June 2019. Conspiracy of Aunts, her first adult novel after years, was brought out by Readomania in the same month. Her byline has appeared in Outlook and Outlook Traveller. She has worked on the dialogues for the Amitabh Bachchan starrer The Last Lear, directed by Rituparno Ghosh. Anjana Basu lives and works as an advertising consultant in Calcutta.
