Our Himalayan village home: a longtime dream come true🙏
It has been a dream of ours to live in a small village in the Himalayas. So grateful that we are now living it 🙏🙏🙏 [Yes, this is only temporary, but so is everything else in life, right?]
Our comfortable little home here is airy, cheerful and serene surrounded by deodar forest (a tall cedar, reminds us of redwoods), huge green mountains with waterfalls, overlooking never-ending valleys and mountain ranges. We can see juicy red and green apples hanging heavy from trees. Multicolored marigolds, dahlias, roses, zinnias, geraniums and vivid blue morning glories are a feast to our eyes. Many white and bright colored butterflies are dancing with joy communing with these beautiful flowers.
The weather is very pleasant here with cool mountain breeze that brings in faint smells of the valley. We can hear distinct and melodious bird calls from birds of different sizes, shapes and colors. We can hear occasional bus or car going by and chatter of locals on their way to fields or the market.
Over the past few days, we became familiar with some local places, a middle school with 26 preteens and teens singing the national anthem at the beginning of the school day and a preschool teacher singing songs (including Vande Mataram) very melodiously to15 cute little kids, a Vishnu temple on a hilltop overlooking beautiful vistas.
On our hike to nearby waterfalls we saw hundreds of sheep and goats relaxing in a green meadow while the shepherds were sitting and chatting nearby in a relaxed friendly manner.
Monkeys: we saw whole families including a couple in love , moms with babies hanging on for dear life and a corn savoring monkey. Unfortunately, but understandably, these monkeys also frequent the garbage dumps of humans, which can be attractive to them as sources of food and curiosity. We saw these monkeys swing from and run up the deodar trees and settle there for the night.
The home we are staying in has four generations (of our host family) living together peacefully, staying in their own spaces, doing their own work. We rent the top floor, an independent area with a kitchen, living spaces and a wrap-around balcony.
While our 4-year-old friend, little S*, is busy playing with her small plastic toys and small bike, great grandma is active and busy with cutting and making apple chips, grandma P* is busy with cooking and cleaning the home while mom K* is busy taking care S’s months-old younger sister and also with stitching salwars and knitting wool socks. Grandpa and S’s Dad are in the field taking care of picking, sorting, packing and sending apples to local markets.
Little S wants to play her green ballon ball whenever we are free and ready. We drew pictures with her – and she can get to be very strict if you color outside the box or write numbers out of sequence!
Grandma P, our host, is always giving us a fresh fruit: green or red apples and vegetables: home grown zucchini, mooli (white radish) just pulled from the ground in her kitchen garden or makka (yellow corn) that was recently harvested by a neighbor. S’s Mom, K, a post-graduate (her major is in Hindi literature), is very happy to alter Prabhu’s kurthas on her sewing machine (of course, we insisted on paying for her excellent tailoring skills).
Life here seems not easy but simple. Everybody is working and contributing to their families to the best of their ability. Family ties are strong, as are the traditional ties to one’s village and as we learned today, the caste system is still strong. On our walks we met many friendly villagers, whose faces light up with genuine smiles as we greet them with folded hands and a hearty Namaste. We feel at peace and at home in this small, serene place surrounded by majestic mountains and simple, affectionate people.
We make our own healthy food, having shopped at the neighborhood store. Grandma P and her husband helped us with shopping on day one and we have since become experts, including remembering to carry our cloth bags.
*Names shortened to respect privacy.
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