‘Today, we have limitless greed of oligarchs, dictators turning Earth into wasteland’: Anuradha Roy

How did your relationship with the hills begin?

The first five or so years of my life, my brother and I lived in tents pitched in the eastern Himalayan foothills, especially Sikkim. Our father was a field geologist, and along with my mother, we accompanied him on many of his postings, which ran for six months at a time. I took my first steps in the mountains as a toddler and we learned early to walk long distances on rough terrain, to find things to occupy ourselves in the wilderness. Maybe this created an affinity. It certainly took away any fear of solitude, silence and forests.

Anuradha Roy with her dogs. (Express Photos)

Called by the Hills moves between the intimate and the observational. How did you negotiate between personal memory and a more collective sense of place?

My brief to myself was quite straightforward: I was going to approach the place that I lived in as if I were writing a travelogue. It is centrally about the place, from the viewpoint of an outsider who has begun to live there and has to make sense of a new geography, climate, social situation, ways of being in a community and in the landscape. I tried to communicate the sense of discovery as well as bafflement as the place gradually permeated me.

The book is rooted in everyday life in Ranikhet, yet it speaks to much larger ecological anxieties. How did living through environmental change in the Kumaon hills shape the questions you were asking as a resident and as a writer?

If I think of just this morning, it is alarming how the peaks on the horizon are mostly bare, black rock, with very little snow on them. Living here for 25 years makes me feel like a walking archive, because stored away in my memory I have images of those same peaks so white with snow and ice all over that it was blinding every winter.

The other day, the sabziwallas in the mandi were talking of ‘climate change’, in those words, remarking how this year’s apple crop in Himachal is being destroyed by the lack of winter rain. A small patch of land is enough to demonstrate how awry things have gone with flowering times, how parched the earth is this winter.

The book I keep thinking of in this context is Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It was written in 1968, set in a post-nuclear war dystopia where animals and plants are mostly endangered or extinct. Today, in place of a nuclear bomb, we have the limitless greed of oligarchs and dictators turning the earth into a wasteland.

Time in Called by the Hills feels layered rather than linear — personal histories overlap with geological and cultural time. How important was this sense of deep time to the structure of the collection?

In the area where we live, we have ancient deodar trees and when one of them falls you have a true sense of its massive size and age – you notice that even the creepers that climb their sides are the size of young tree trunks and that the tree was a miniature world – for other plants, woodpeckers, things that lived off it. We also feel rumbles in the ground regularly, quakes are not uncommon, the house develops new cracks as the earth shifts.

As a human, you feel aware of your own inconsequentiality very concretely if you live here. At the same time, daily life is full of its quota of absurdities, happinesses, and sorrows as anywhere – and this is what the book tries to reflect.

Human-wildlife interactions appear quietly but persistently in your reflections. With rising human encroachment and changing land use patterns in the region, what shifts have you observed in how people relate to the non-human world around them?

I think people’s sense of certainty has crumbled because the patterns of behaviour that have existed in living memory no longer hold true. It is now commonplace for nocturnal leopards to be foraging in daytime, and in populated areas. There are animals we used to sight regularly that have vanished – such as foxes and flying squirrels. Winter birds arrive later and leave earlier. Taken together all the changes point to something profoundly disturbing.

One of the questions that the book raises is what it means to live “well” in a fragile environment. Uttarakhand has seen a rapid increase in infrastructure projects in recent years. How have you seen the metric of living “well” morph through these government projects? What are some everyday compromises you’ve seen people make between economic survival and ecological responsibility?

I don’t see much sense of ecological responsibility, whether in government projects or in the individual drive to make money while it can be made. It is usually much more about greed than it is about survival.

Several essays engage with the tension between belonging and intrusion — between those who have always lived in the hills and those who arrive later. How did you manage this dynamic in the early days and what wisdom have you gleaned from it since in a state where migration, land ownership, and development are politically sensitive issues?

Urban settlers and tourists passing through are vital to the rural hill economy and simultaneously, they are resented for being instruments of dispossession and destruction. It is a conundrum. Anyone who hopes to make a home in a new place needs to be curious, respectful, aware of their ignorance, careful to find their own niche within the community gradually, without rushing anything. Those of us who live here throughout the year are very aware that we need to give back to the place in whatever way is possible for us if we are to belong. We feel a strong sense of protectiveness and responsibility towards the place.