It takes me two misses to accept that GPS is of no help in Umrisain village in Rishikesh. The third time round, the signboard for the Phool Chatti Ashram comes up in clear view. So does Raghav at the head-end to the dirt road that leads to his design home and B&B (bed and breakfast), Tiny Farm Lab, where I am booked to stay after a six-day trek in the Himalaya.
I have packed what I will need for the two days at the B&B in a cabin-sized suitcase, just as Raghav had instructed over the phone. The rest of my belongings are in a rucksack, which he stows in a hired storeroom. He loads the suitcase on his rickety scooter, which he calls “The Tesla Truck”.
He must have been waiting for a while in the scorching heat, but his manner betrays no impatience. With a sharp-set beard and black-framed glasses, a ring through a pierced septum, and beaten-down slippers, Raghav could easily pass off as an art student you see at the Triveni cafe in Delhi. Which is as far removed from his real persona as Delhi is from this dot of a village in Uttarakhand.
As we bump along the road with the river flowing by its side, Raghav gives me instructions on how I will have to dismount when we hit the sandy beach and cross the bridge, from where we will resume our journey. We pass a sparse sal forest with scraggly undergrowth, whittled and burnt under the punishing sun. A few days of monsoon and this will be transformed, Raghav says, his voice muffled by the whirr of the scooter.
Closer to the B&B, we pass by a sprawling property that has in its middle a mansion with a grey muted slate roof that seems abandoned but for the reverberating thrum of a diesel generator and an Alsatian that will not stop barking. The property belongs to the Thapars, an old business that got submerged in the gush of new India. The Thapars are a big business family, and this branch of the family was known for its clothing brand, JCT Phagwara, which made the actor Juhi Chawla a family name in the 1980s.
We get off the scooter, but we are not there yet. A little into the hike, Tiny Farm Lab comes into view on a hilltop, its profile face to the river, rising over the landscape of Umrisain like a mud sculpture, its conical roof tapering to a shikhar (peak).
Walking up the uneven path, it seems as if this mud-house has always been here, just like the sal forest we passed or the mountains behind, waiting for Raghav to rediscover it.
But such an assumption would be an injustice to his labours. Raghav, a trained architect, with his brother Ansh, handcrafted the mudhouse over three years (and completed it in 2021), along with the help of guests crowdsourced from 18 countries through Workaway (a platform for cultural exchange).
In return, the visitors got to experience life in a homestay in the village and the experience of co-creating a mud-house. They danced and stomped on the mud to mix it with straw and water to the beat of music from across the world. All that stomping added strength to the material, which then yielded to their hands for the soft curves along the mudhouse, the rounded niches in the room, and the sculptural forms on its exterior. In the dim light of the night, they all seem to be throbbing with life.
On the right of the entrance, there is a mud forno for wood-fired pizzas. Inside are wicker baskets, tiny ceramics, and a slate tabletop: an eclectic mix of art and utilities that mirrors the cultural diversity of its creators. The materials that went into its making, Raghav tells me, were sourced from around the village: the mud came from the river, and driftwood was crafted into an artistic chandelier and the wooden beams under the roof.
He chose mud because it is the material local residents once used to keep their homes cool in summers and warm in winters. But it is around 45 degrees outside, and though cooler inside, it is barely comfortable. The room is not air-conditioned, which is the idea, but then who could have thought that here in Umrisain, which once boasted of a subtropical climate, temperatures could rise so high?
These hills were where Delhiites escaped to in the summers of yore. Rishikesh was also known for its connection with the Beatles and Mahesh Yogi, the original transcendalist. Now it is Patanjali that claims to have remedies for all ills. As for its promoter, Baba Ramdev, strictures from the highest court of the country have not dented his business. Rishikesh is now the yoga capital of the world.
***
It is just past noon, and Raghav brings me lunch: rice, dal, and chutney. A green, tarty chutney that he says Daadi made for me. Daadi will come to occupy much of the conversations to follow over the course of the next two days: the grandmother of the village in whose house he lives, the mascot of Tiny Farm Lab.
But a bath first; I have not had one in the past six days while on a trek to Ali Bedni Bugyal. A bath would only remove the grime; it cannot cool my body. My eyes are burning, the fan reduced to a token presence though its valiant sputtering would make you think otherwise. Raghav would have read my mind, I think guiltily, and I make haste to inform him that the base camp for the trek at Lohar Jung at 7,700 feet was just as hot.
Daadi’s daughter Neelam returns in the evening with tea and a generous lot of crunchy pakoras packed in a casserole. She has come home to help her mother this time round because the last guest got frightened of Daadi’s wizened appearance. Or so she claims, laughing. Daadi is only 75 years old; my idea of old age adjusted substantially now that I will hit 60 soon. Neelam needs no encouragement to continue talking. She is married into a family in Tehri, which is etched in our collective memory as the site of a powerful people’s protest against a dam—to meet the growing power needs of city folk in Delhi and beyond—that eventually submerged much of Tehri.
Soon, the laughter fades and Neelam’s despondency rises. She has a daughter to marry off, and one of her legs no longer works well after an injury that was left untreated because “who will go to Haridwar for treatment and who has the money?”
From the porch of the mud-house, munching on the pakoras, I watch the cars on the highway, and as the night settles, they seem to form a single string of light on the neck of the dark mountain behind. All through the afternoon, without a care for the searing sun, rafters on the Ganga shouted, “Har Har Mahadev”, conveying the travellers’ energy to the sleepy village. Now, that too has quietened down.
My eyes follow a young girl’s frenetic activity in the house below. She wheels an invalid elder to the balcony and brings a pedestal fan close to him, after spending a long time fiddling with the socket. Her hair is wet, perhaps after a bath, and she waters the plants and ends the chore with folded hands, praying to the tulsi plant. Thereafter, she flits in and out of the house in countless, never-ending chores.
Later, I come to know that she is the only one from the village enrolled at the government-run school at Kotagaon, and trudges through a tricky path in the forests, a journey that takes her one and a half hours. “Where do the rest go?” I ask. They go to Dehradun or Chandigarh, some further away to Delhi. This is how villages empty out.
A study commissioned by the government of Uttarakhand identified 734 such ghost villages besides another 565 villages that got depopulated by more than half over a decade (2008–18). It estimated that around 5 lakh people have migrated from across the State, of which 1.19 lakh have left the villages permanently.
Migration from Umrisain, Raghav informs me, was not for jobs as much as for education. Education is seen as a means to escape privation in the hills. Two of Daadi’s granddaughters have managed “decent” jobs, one in a computer centre and the other at a jewellery shop in Dehradun.
Visitors got to experience life in a homestay in the village and the experience of co-creating a mud-house. They danced and stomped on the mud to mix it with straw and water to the beat of music from across the world.
| Photo Credit:
HANISH BHATEJA/BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
When the weary sun descends behind the mountains, the 20-something Sumit comes in, barely greeting me before returning to playing PUBG on his mobile phone. His concentration on the game does not waver as he waters the trees on the property and then the roof.
In troops 27-year-old Ashish, yet another of Daadi’s grandsons. He organises rafting, he says, and shows me, unbidden, the documents that establish his credentials. Before COVID struck, he was in Jammu, working with a rafting company, a job he did not (or could not) return to. His eyes are shifty, his body carries the defeat of de-addiction.
Ashish is not the only COVID returnee of the village. His father, Satinder Singh, also returned and now runs a shop near the river. He does not regret the decision. “We will never be hungry here. In the city, it is different. One week off from work, and you have nothing left to eat,” he says. But it is different for those who sold their homes after migration. “They have nothing to return to.”
Another man comes in: stocky, with hazel eyes and a ruddy tan, and very foreign-looking, but he is from here, this village. Earlier in the day, women passed by the property, with the traditional tamata pots of water on their heads, one hand gently holding the side of the pot. They did not come in, and they were not embarrassed when caught peeping into my room.
“Isn’t there water supply in the village?” I ask Neelam. The government’s Jal Jeevan mission that promises piped water connection to every household has reached Umrisain too. But the pipelines were laid above ground, and they get clogged with loose stones and dry leaves. Occasionally, the pipes crack under the foot of a marauding elephant. Neelam says that the locals prefer, as they have always done, cool water fetched from inside the forest for drinking purposes. Who prefers it, the men? Women go in groups, laughing and chatting all the time, and perhaps this chore means more to them than just fetching cool drinking water.
This stream of local people to the mud-house seems to mark it as some sort of centre to village life. Daadi is on Raghav’s rolls no doubt, but the village’s connection with the mudhouse seems to transcend the operational links. This is a hard-won trust, I am sure: the sweet fruit of patience and good conduct.
But this motley crowd—including the men and boys reeking of liquor, their high aspirations unmet—might not be easy for Raghav to manage, and the strain shows even behind the shy smile. (Liquor and tourism continue to be two major sources of revenue for the State.)
Besides Daadi, Neelam and Sumit work with Raghav. Some others in the village are into rafting. A recent rage is pre-wedding shoots on the bridge behind Satinder Singh’s tea shop. Satinder’s wife, Lakshmi, is at the makeshift kitchen, hidden behind the packets of chips, nachos, and Kurkure hung on logs of wood at the shop’s entrance.
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She also doubles up as an Accredited Social Health Activist for Umrisain. Every village has one, drawn from among the villagers, who records deaths, births, and immunisation and provides the first line of care before the ill are taken under professional care. “You get an honorarium?” I ask. She nods, but it is hardly a steady source of income. To get it, she has to submit her reports at the Auxiliary Nurse Midwife sub-centre at Mohanchatti, which is generally inaccessible and is completely out of bounds during rains. The sub-centre caters to around 90 villages, including Umrisain.
The Chief Minister of the adjacent State of Uttar Pradesh, from which Uttarakhand was carved out in 2000, hails from this area, part of Yamkeshwar block, and a helipad constructed for his visits, I am told, stands in the middle of crumbling infrastructure. Yamkeshwar block is one of those most affected by migration. Around half of the migrants from the block are young, between 26 and 35. One such nearly abandoned village is Pokhari, its hills taken over by the Patanjali group, which runs Patanjali Wellness Vedalife. (Pokhari was also in the news for the revival of traditional medical systems by COVID returnees.)
***
I spend a fitful night at the mud-house. Watering of the roof has helped but just about. And then, sometime in the early morning, a gift of cool air from the river wafts into my room. When Raghav comes bearing tea in the morning, I ask him about the spot where the highway seems to have given away. “A landslide?” I ask. He shakes his head: “It’s been like this since we came, must be some construction which was abandoned midway.”
Such sights are common in Uttarakhand. Along the route from the base camp at Lohar Jung, we saw sites of landslides, the rubble piled up and pushed to the side while the drilling machines continued their assault on the young mountains.
On an earlier trek to Har Ki Dun with its dramatic view of the Swargarohini peaks (the only passage to heaven bypassing death, so goes the legend), the villagers we met told us how often the sick give up, with no hope of reaching a hospital in time. If only there was a road, they lamented.
This yearning for roads finds expression all along Uttarakhand, stoking ambitious projects for the expansion of highways and railheads. Environmental laws have been made more “business-friendly” ever since the mountains and the trees have come to be seen as hindrances to these dreams.
A view of the Ganga from the mud-house. All through the afternoon, without a care for the searing sun, rafters on Ganga shouted, “Har Har Mahadev”, conveying the travellers’ energy to the sleepy village.
| Photo Credit:
ATIK BHEDA/BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
But the young folds of the Himalaya cannot take any more assault, and in places, it has brought the human labours to naught. People speak of a newly constructed four-lane highway, of which only two lanes are kept open at any given time, while an earthmover works round the clock clearing the rubble from landslides along its stretches, thus reducing it to the two-lane road it has been for more than 15 years.
Elsewhere in the State, Joshimath has collapsed, while the devastation of Kedarnath was immortalised in a popular Hindi movie. Despite all these setbacks, construction follows the same rules that have failed in the mountains. A decentralised model for region-specific climate-resilient solutions eludes policymakers. As Keynes said: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping the old ones.”
Uttarakhand is Devbhoomi, the land of the gods, and the government wants to let pilgrims cruise at city speeds to reach the gods. Some kind of quick-fix highway spirituality. This is the land on which Adi Sankara once trod on foot and breathed his last at Kedarnath at the feet of the mighty Siva. The devout who followed him upheld the tradition of pleasing the gods with their toil—both physical and spiritual—to be bestowed a glimpse of the Dev.
Previously, pilgrims lived on alms from local residents. The highway pilgrimage has upended this relationship: the pilgrims cruising on the tarmac now signify currency notes. The local economy depends on the pilgrims (and of course, yoga seekers). Forget four-lane highways, even helicopters ply to Kedarnath. But what about the local infrastructure?
Down south and in the Western Ghats, “development” has already resulted in the unfolding of a tragedy. The site is Wayanad in Kerala, which lost 8,000 sq km of land to landslides—villages with evocative names like Chooralmala (straw-hill), Attamala, Noolpuzha (thread-stream), and Mundakkai were washed away.
Thirteen years before, the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, popularly called the Gadgil Committee, looked at how “development” would impact the Western Ghats. Its report cautioned that placing any one capital stock over the rest would be calamitous.
It listed the four capital stocks a nation has: natural (water, vegetation, biodiversity, agricultural, and animal husbandry), social (cooperative behaviour and a sense of security), human (education, health, and employability), and man-made (such as highways and dams). India’s curse is that it has exclusively focussed, in colonial times and now, on building up highly subsidised man-made capital at a cost to the rest. The result was a 100-fold increase in the frequency of landslides in the Western Ghats between 2011 and 2020.
***
A dip in the Ganga is planned for the day, and Neelam is to accompany me. It is already hot at 7:30 am. Along the way, we meet people whom Neelam greets cheerfully, and when their are backs turned to us, she shares their sad stories. One has a bedridden father; another has lost his job. Desolation is the recurrent theme of her stories, which she relates cheerfully, relentlessly.
The river is placid and cool. With uncertain steps, I wade into the water, my fingers pressing on a rounded boulder. Further away, Neelam needs no such support, and with a stick she demonstrates that the water is no more than knee-deep. She dips her head into the water, and I follow suit. She is running a fever and has a headache, but she plunges in anyway for Mother Ganga’s healing touch.
On our return, we pass the Thapar property, and she loses her cheer. “If they could have lived here, some of us would have found jobs,” she says. The Thapar family did live here for many years but have stopped coming since 2011. She points to a patch of land where a wellness centre is to come up, which could do a Thapar for Umrisain this time, although not at that scale.
Breakfast is aloo parathas, three perfect rounds each as big as a large plate, placed in a wicker basket. It is Daadi who brings in the food this time. She places the raw mango chutney on the table first with a toothy smile: “Raghav said that you loved it,” she says. Her gaunt face framed in large spectacles is lit with a wide smile. Her knees hurt, she says, but she wanted to meet me.
The stories that follow are no different from Neelam’s: her worries are on getting her granddaughter married and then Neelam’s treatment. She says that she has no tools to deal with the new world: the heat, the forest fires, the wild animals spilling out of the forest and trampling on her fields with their desperate feet, the storms. All these changes have happened in less than 60 years, the length of the period she has lived in Umrisain, since her marriage at the age of 15. “But we have to adjust,” she concludes, still smiling. “Cold, heat, the cataract, the wobbly knees, old age. We adjust.”
The falling dark takes the edge off the hustle on the other side. The hills in silhouette appear inviolate. But it is still hot. I bring myself to a stroll up to Daadi’s house. She rises from a white plastic chair and greets me with a warm smile, palms folded. Raghav is with her. From her verandah, we look out together at the corn standing motionless on her land and the forest ahead. “What do they do with corn?” I ask. He directs the question to Daadi, who lists the preparations: a nutritious paste that adds texture to her special kadhi, and chutneys. In winter, she grows garlic, onion, radish, cauliflower, potato, peas, beans, and rajma (kidney beans). In times gone past, she grew more. Jhangore, a kheer made from millet, is a delicacy. Neelam turns up her nose at the mention of another, mandwa. “I refuse to touch that porridge,” says Neelam, laughing.
A gul (channel) in the middle irrigates this patch of land. It is a lot of work, and her knees do not hold up well, and yet she cannot stop herself. “But when the monkeys come and ruin the crop, it feels like someone has scratched my skin and drawn blood,” she says, her fingers mimicking how it feels.
Inside the mud-house. The room is not air-conditioned, which is the idea, but who could have thought that here in Umrisain, which once boasted of a subtropical climate, temperatures could rise so high?
| Photo Credit:
ATIK BHEDA/BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
In the days of her youth, she tackled more than monkeys. The families, mostly relatives belonging to the same Rana clan—they claim Rajput ancestry—guarded the fields together. From wild boars, bears, and, in 1993, an elephant. That night, she and her cousin were sleeping on the machan outside when they heard the rumble. She had no idea that it was an elephant until it threw her off the machan with its trunk. She crawled back to her house, fearing the worst, but her sons were safe, only the crops were destroyed. One can sense pride as she speaks, in the memory of that young woman who endured so much. “The young don’t have the stomach for all this,” she waves her hand dismissively.
“They are afraid,” says Satinder.
Pat comes her reply: “It wasn’t that we didn’t know fear. We were afraid too.”
There was a time when her husband was away, and she was alone with her young children. Fearing that a thief had entered her property, she stood behind the window and mimicked the sound of the hookah—she laughs as she gestures with her fingers circled around her mouth—to convince the thieves that she was not alone and that there were men in the house. “No, no, it was no thief,” she clarifies, “it was some animal, but we were afraid too.”
“Where were the men?” I ask.
“With the Thapars. Satinder’s father was an electrician, some other men from here too. They spent their life in Thapar’s service, what else?”
Satinder is not amused. “Arre, that was his job,” he says, defending his father, but Daadi waves him off with a smile.
Those days, she worked in the fields that lay before us as well as at their family land higher up in Parlako, and also at the Thapar house below. All to bring up her six children. “Besides the three buffaloes,” adds Raghav, “and then she did pehredari [guard duty] at night.”
“No sleep?” I ask.
“No more than 3-4 hours,” she says.
It must have been gruelling, but that is the life she misses. Talking about it lends a lilt to her voice. Wiping her glasses with her pallu, she speaks of a time in the village when all the fields were green and the forest was chirpy with contented birds. “What’s life without cows and buffaloes?”
There were many more trees in her backyard (which she cut for the concrete verandah where we now sit). And her mud-house with only the roof plastered, which kept her family cool in summers, but then such a summer as one that she endures now was unimaginable back then. “Why did you then make it concrete?” I ask.
“Who will give girls to families with kachcha houses?” she asks. “And sarkar runs an awas scheme to fund concrete houses.”
She talks of how they laid the patali (slate) on the roof in the winter with her hands wearing cotton bandages. “So heavy,” she says, “we got the slabs from Mohanchatti and then put them on our roofs. In the hills, men relax while women work.”
Further away, the trees in the forest sway gently to a breeze that loses strength midway. Raghav does not join in on the despair but resists the urge to find a local quick-fix to the life-altering changes in Daadi’s life. “Everything is interconnected,” he says, “the choices we make in the city: how we construct, how we commute, what we consume, and where we source it from, affects us all. But yes, it is here, in the mountains, that we seem most adversely hit.”
For much of his young adult life, Raghav has been probing this issue. His quest for sustainability brought him to Umrisain, and he must keep the faith. However frustrating it might be occasionally, this is where his dreams took shape. Design is his love. “The idea was never to run a resort but to design,” he says. His work in the field is much feted. Tiny Farm Lab won the Kohler Bold Design Award and got flattering coverage in Architecture Digest, and more projects have come his way. One at Varanasi, another in Rishikesh itself. His (and Ansh’s) is a journey poised for more.
***
I wheel out my suitcase, having forgotten about the rucksack in the storeroom, but Raghav has not, and as I watch his unhurried steps, I marvel at how much alertness running the mud-house demands. We retrace the steps we had taken to reach here: the hike, the scooter ride, the bridge on the river, the few steps in the sand, the scooter again, to the car park where I find the taxi driver waiting.
Raghav (seated) with his brother Ansh. The stream of locals tot he mud-house seem to mark it as some sort of centre to the village life. But the motley crowd might not be easy to manage for Raghav, and the strain shows even behind the shy smile.
| Photo Credit:
AISHWARYA LAKHANI/BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Bhimji grumbles as I settle in his car. Along the Ganga, pilgrims throng the ghats, today being the Ganga Dasara. Bhimji complains about his swollen feet; he says he has been up since 5 am and now it is already 11 am. It took him 5 hours to reach me, this journey from Haridwar that should not have taken more than 45 minutes. “Why didn’t I cancel the trip?” he says, slapping his forehead, “but how could I backtrack on inspectorji?” (A friend who arranged the ride to Delhi is an inspector in Haridwar.) “Ek boond neend bhi naseeb nahi” (No sleep in my destiny).
The last piece of information about him being sleep-deprived alarms me. I try to engage him in conversation, but his defeated spirit allows no such possibility. When I suggest that we stop for tea and food, he brushes aside the offer. Along the route, he takes videos of the traffic to share with fellow drivers and then rings them. “Dekha? [See?] Go home, sleep,” are his instructions.
Wherever the taxi stops—which it does more often than move, cars crammed bumper-to-bumper—Bhimji calls out to other drivers on the road to scold them for having accepted rides on this day. After about three hours, he finds an opening in the traffic to exit the highway and hit a bypass, at which point he turns back to me, triumphant: “Dekha? I knew. Now we are good.” I once again ask if we could not stop somewhere to refresh ourselves, but he waves his hand.
An hour later, we stop at a crowded but clean place. Families sporting vermilion tilaks on the forehead and the women clad in red chunnis enjoy the break while I settle down with a mango shake. When I step out, even a few minutes in the heat seems intolerable, and I rush towards Bhimji’s waving hand.
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In the meantime, he has managed to bandage his swollen feet and wash his face and is in a dramatically changed mood. Fellow drivers nod to him respectfully, and I ask if they are from his native place. He laughs: “No, no, they all know me, they call me mamaji.” No wonder, the “uncle” thought it fit earlier to bark orders on the phone asking them to sit at home and refuse rides.
It takes us close to 11 hours to reach Delhi (a distance that should not have taken more than 4-5 hours), and Bhimji demands Rs.2,000 more. “It was fire out there,” he says, and he must be compensated.
Back in my flat, I throw my bags aside and switch on the air conditioner. Imprisoned in the room. It seems impossible to step out of the air-conditioned comfort in this heat. I shut my eyes and think: tomorrow will be different. It certainly will not be so bad. This is the default switch for us ordinary folks. We brush aside a burning-hot day or a cloudburst as unique events that do not, in our minds, add up to the pile of evidence that points to their recurrence or direction towards peril.
Climate change seems like a planetary problem, and worrying about it is a luxury we do not allow ourselves, fixated as we are, more so in recent times, with the more immediate. It is not surprising, therefore, that elections are not fought on climate change. Elected governments nudge us to the dictum that in order to demand a change, we must change ourselves first.
We fly too often, we eat too much meat, we go on long drives in cars that guzzle oil, we use air conditioners, we waste water, we do not plant trees. A cheap trick, it now seems, to evade responsibility. If the response to inequity is cash transfers and free rice, the “compensatory state” could well begin direct beneficiary transfer of air cans, 100 grams more for the ladki-behens whom we can trust with such valuables.
The likes of Raghav are not so cynical. They do not give up hope on governments, but they do not wait for it to always lead the way either. A WhatsApp group that Raghav calls Tiny Farm Friends (with 286 members) is an assemblage of enquiries on the theme of sustainability. Ideas here span the universe with mycelium-based products, metal scrap artistry, textile upcycling, alternatives to plastic using seaweed, and forest spirit learning, besides innovations in design.
To these people, climate change is not the subject matter of trenchant negotiations but a lived reality, and hope stems from choices, small and big, that could add up to something. An agriculturist, an artist, a homemaker, a student, or an architect like Raghav—they find different ways to deal with it, and by demonstrating them, they do their bit, creating an alternative consciousness. They recognise the ignorance-despair binary and do what they do even if, in the immediate context, it might seem futile within a deeply flawed structure. The Tiny Farm Friends lives with a faith, both innocent and audacious, that the rest of us are unable to muster.
Rebecca Mathai is a Delhi-based writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in major literary magazines and newspapers.
