In the spring of 1992, I traveled to Shimla, a British-built Himalayan town, in order to find a cottage I could rent cheaply for a few summers. I wanted to be away from my university in Delhi, where I was studying—pointlessly, I thought—for a degree in English. I wanted to be away from Delhi itself, which I had begun to find oppressive. Above all, I wanted to be a writer, and had for a long time fantasized about reading and writing in the silence and seclusion of the Himalayas.

		Outside History Photographs by RAGHU RAI

A part of me was also vulnerable to the British-created romance of the hill station: the promenades on Mall Road, the brilliant snowy mornings spent in dimly lit coffee houses, the afternoons browsed away in antiquarian bookstores.

I was swiftly disabused of that idea. On the winding road to Shimla from the railhead, Kalka, there were sandbagged checkpoints. In the adjoining state of Punjab, Sikh militants had been fighting for more than a decade for a separate state. An insurgency had also broken out in nearby Kashmir. From both places came the news of terrorist murders, bombings, extrajudicial executions and torture. Policemen cradling automatic rifles brought their fear into the cramped bus as they ordered the passengers to open their bags and shouted at those who were slow to respond.

Then, Shimla, sighted from afar, seemed a big heap of concrete-box buildings, less a picturesque hill station than a small Indian town recreated vertically amid green hills. The view didn't improve much in close-up. The Indian economy had just begun to awaken out of a four-decade, semisocialist torpor. Shopping vacations in Singapore were still some years away for most of the emerging middle class. For now, their ambitious members, mostly young men and women from the cities of Delhi and Chandigarh, savored their growing wealth at the mock-Tudor shops and video-game parlors of Shimla. Their beautifully clear skin tones and brand-name jeans and sneakers—emblems of class as well as caste—gave off an appearance of general well-being that the British probably also possessed at the height of their power. They gave Shimla a touch of glamour. But just on the street below Mall Road, hectic with coolies in rags, the city began to deteriorate, alley by alley, until it seethed at the very bottom of the hill in a squalor of low tin shacks and exposed stagnant drains.

I put up with Shimla's depressing incongruities for a few days, and then one morning I took a bus to Mashobra, identified in my guidebook as a "nice picnic spot." After about half an hour of traveling northward, the bus left the highway, stuttered through a roadside village filled with tottering houses of wood and tin, and then abruptly stopped. I saw that I was on a long ridge, facing a vast abyss filled with the purest blue air. The view, extending far to the east, was clear and spectacular: a craggy row of white mountain peaks, overhanging layers of hills and ridges and a deep, wooded valley.

This was Mashobra. Miraculously, I walked down the valley to discover that in the middle of an apple orchard precisely the kind of cottage I was looking for had just been built. It belonged to a family of Sanskrit scholars called the Sharmas. It stood above a cowshed and what looked like storage rooms for fodder, and over a long room with an antique-looking printing press. The rooms were still full of the aroma of wood shavings—it stayed for many months until pushed out in October by the fragrance of freshly plucked apples stored underneath. Just below the house was a small field of corn, barren and worked over by an old hunch-backed peasant. From the edge of the field, pine forests sloped down far into the valley, up to the paddy fields and wooden houses with shiny slate roofs that rested at the very bottom, in what seemed like another time and space. Looking up, I held the same view I had as I came out of the bus—the valley, the snow-capped mountains and the sky locked in a trance so private that you could only watch and be still.

Mr. Sharma, a tall, dignified man, asked for a token rent. He said he wasn't interested in making money on his new property, which was intended for writers and scholars like me. His father had set up the first Sanskrit college in Shimla. He himself published a monthly magazine in Sanskrit from the press beneath my cottage. It didn't take me long to move in. But some years passed, and I had to travel much, before I could know properly where I was.

Most of Mashobra's 2,000 inhabitants—farmers, low-level government employees, shopkeepers—had little money. But the village had no wretchedness of the kind found on the Indian plains. On the road leading north, past a few grocery shops, there were British-built houses: old bungalows that hid behind tall hedges and had—apart from the kind of melancholy gardens and arbors I had read about in Turgenev's novels and stories—smoke-filled dingy outhouses for servants, where women bent low over wood fires.

Indians had owned these bungalows for some time now. One of them belonged to the descendants of a lecherous maharaja whom the British had banned from entering Shimla. Another served as the retreat of a prince from Nepal. An industrial magnate from Delhi fleeing private tragedy—the death of his young son—was the most faithful among the absentee owners of the bungalows, which were largely maintained by the servants, mostly migrant laborers from distant Himalayan villages, whom I had seen in the outhouses.

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