In the summer of 2025, a study published in the journal Earth alerted us to our growing disconnect with nature. As cities multiply and the wilderness dwindles, words connected to nature are disappearing from our vocabulary as well. The study found that the use of nature-related words has reduced by over 60 per cent between 1800-2019. Many familiar terms like ‘meadow’, ‘magpie’ and ‘beak’ among others, have vanished from English-language books. Anuradha Roy’s new book, Called by the Hills, is a welcome antidote to this loss. Roy moved from Delhi to Ranikhet about 25 years ago with her husband and her beloved dogs. She built a home there and eased into the rhythms of the Himalayan wild over time. Her memoir—her first work of non-fiction—gives readers a taste of both the romance and the ruggedness of life in the hills. There are invaluable lessons on offer about engaging fully with the natural world.
Roy is the author of five novels, including the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning All the Lives We Never Lived and Sleeping on Jupiter, which received the DSC Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker. As in her novels, the prose is graceful and evocative in her memoir, drawing readers right into the heart of the Himalaya. She pays attention to trees and flowers, and to all creatures big and small who roam free as she rambles along the mountain paths. She listens to the songs of whistling thrushes, delights in the play of light and shade on snow-capped peaks, soaks in the “silence of the forest broken only by the calls of birds and animals.” Attention, the rarest form of generosity, is what we owe to nature in the time of the climate catastrophe. Roy shows us how to go about it.
Called by the Hills begins at a turning point: Roy and her husband have just started their own publishing house (Permanent Black), and have also decided to set up home in a run-down cottage in Ranikhet, perched on the edge of the estate belonging to their publisher friend, Ravi Dayal, and his wife Mala. The cottage is a ruin. It takes them half a year to get it into a somewhat habitable state. Roy’s account of this phase is engaging. Challenges crop up, including “dissuading snakes and scorpions in their quest for rent-free accommodation” [in their cottage]; submitting an application for a landline and the endless wait; and traipsing down the hillside to a little shop on Mall Road to access the dial-up internet.
Everything takes time, which prompts Roy to ponder how busyness is considered the marker of a person’s worth in cities. But in her new home, humans have embraced the air of leisure of the natural world. She spots men soaking in the sun, “doing nothing all day”. Women’s work—“at home, in the forest, with their cattle”—on the other hand, is never done.
Roy’s heart is set on growing a garden. A substantial portion of the book is devoted to her escapades on the patch of land next to her cottage, where she plants seeds and cuttings, and watches birds, butterflies and her dogs flit about. Some Ranikhet veterans who are not all that impressed by her gardening skills give her unsolicited advice. An old woman walks by, accompanied by six dogs and a dozen goats, and says, “Everything happens in its own time. Flowers bloom in their own time. And half of them will die.”
Roy absorbs all such tips—offered by humans and non-humans—with a writer’s curiosity and a botanist’s keenness. Living in Ranikhet gives her a totally different perspective on her writing life. Her neighbours are busy trying to earn a living, working as drivers and ferrying around tourists, or serving at hotels. To them, the matter of writing books is “unfathomable.” Occasionally, when Roy ventures to the big city for literary events, it’s an effort to tune into the “hyper-charged discussions, the discreet sizing-up routines”, and she gladly returns to the “silence of the forests and mountains” afterwards.
She meets, and befriends, many people in her mountain home. There is her housekeeper Ama, who she likes to call ‘the Ancient’; her neighbour Amit, a “gentle alcoholic” whose garden is a thing of beauty and whose library is stocked with classics like Smyth’s Valley of Flowers and The Macdonald Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers. Roy paints a vivid picture of the lives of the people around her, writing about them with warmth and humour, and closely observing their interactions with nature. She also sprinkles her memoir with quotes from the works of other authors, travellers and botanists who have been fascinated by the Himalayan region, and have helped to broaden our understanding of the fragile ecosystem.
Called by the Hills is a beautifully crafted ode to the Himalaya as well as a heartfelt lament for its continuing degradation. Roy writes of vanishing species—foxes and flying squirrels who fled when trucks carrying construction material barged into their forest home. She tells the stories of residents of old Tehri, whose homes were drowned by the advent of big dams. She records people’s frustration and fears about how governments, hand-in-hand with giant corporations, are ravaging our forests and rivers. “Nobody can reverse this or stop it,” she warns. “It has been and will be coitus uninterruptus continuus until there is nothing left to destroy.”
Vineetha Mokkil is senior associate editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories
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