In our Himalayan village, summers are hotter, winters warmer and the rains crueller

A couple of weeks ago, I sat with our neighbours Priyanka and her husband, Devinder Negi in their kitchen, drinking hot tea. We were drenched. They had been plucking apples, I had been filming them. Their orchard is in Kotgaon. Priyanka remembers winters when snow swallowed her whole, even as she stood on tiptoe — today Kotgaon gets barely more than a powdery dusting in late winter. “Now, if it snows even an inch, we go to the temple and give thanks, as we will have a good apple crop,” she said. Apples need chilling hours — a long winter dormancy when the temperature holds steady between 0°C and 7°C. Those cold hours act like a reset button for the tree, letting it rest, gather strength, and prepare to blossom come spring. Without enough of that deep, restive cold, the tree doesn’t flower fully, and the fruit it bears are fewer, weaker. Devinder added simply, “If it doesn’t snow, we get less harvest.”

We’ve been battling incessant rain here this year. Here is the Mori Tehsil of the Upper Tons Valley, 38 far-flung villages stitched between thick pine and deodar forests, where a hundred mountain springs roar back to life each monsoon. A wildlife sanctuary sprawls around us, scattered with leopard and snow leopard, porcupine, bear, jackal, mountain deer, and the endless troops of monkeys that farmers are forced to wage war against. The monkeys strip the apples off trees, raid the rajma fields and dig out the potatoes, the three lifeline crops here that fill the kothars alongside ragi, amaranth, rice, and seasonal vegetables. This year, the rains, which usually slow down after August 15 are still unrelenting. They have wrecked the roads, landslides pushing us to take dangerous kachcha detours. Trucks loaded with fruit crawl towards the mandi in Dehradun, 200 kilometres away, sometimes sitting stranded for hours while the apples soften in their crates, the farmers’ year-long labour bleeding away on the roadside.

This is not the immediate violence of the river breach in Dharali, Harsil — just 35 miles away as the crow flies, in the same district of Uttarkashi — that drowned fields and flattened buildings. Here, and across the breadth of the Himalayas, even in the places untouched by reportable disaster, the ones that never make it to the news, the damage seeps in quietly, but cruelly. It gnaws at livelihoods, chews through what people grow, what they eat, the way they live.

Rajmohan, who works with us, tells me one evening, “The word is that the rajma crop is destroyed by the long-drawn monsoon this year.” The leaves are turning yellow. Last year the rains came too late. The year before, hail tore the almost-ready beans in early October. We built a seed bank, not only to save the old varieties which are fast disappearing, but just so farmers would have enough seed to plant next year. Rajmohan is convinced rajma will disappear from the valley within five years. “Itni mehnat, sab barbaad.” So much effort, all wasted.

The unabated monsoons themselves are a deluge of inconveniences. Trees crash into power lines, plunging villages into darkness for days. Three times over the last month we lost electricity for nearly a week at a stretch. The lines get patched up only for the next storm to rip them apart again. Here, you feel the wrath of nature without a filter. Thunder ricochets off the cliffs. Rivers froth and howl. Rain batters rooftops until your pulse syncs with the downpour, a fast-paced “dhak dhak dhak.” Climate anxiety doesn’t feel abstract in a place like this, it feels very real, the breath quickening in your chest as lightning strikes a tree with a resounding crack that sends shivers down your back.

This is our 14th year in the mountains, and the first year we felt summers so stifling we caved and bought a fan. A table fan, not yet a ceiling fan, holding on to the hope that next summer will return to “normal.” That winters will bring back their three feet of snow, that spring will bring ample blossom, that rains will end in rainbows. But it’s been five years since we saw what we once called a regular weather year. Maybe this irregularity is regular now. Is that what they call climate change? We still pine for what we used to know.

The writer is a filmmaker and co-founder of Tons Valley Shop & SAYB, brands rooted in the Himalayas