Few of the tourists with clear skin and brand-name outfits whom I had spotted in Shimla stayed for more than an hour or two in Mashobra. When I came to live in the village, its first big hotel, The Gables, had just come up. It stayed empty. One day, while walking to Wildflower Hall—the house Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British Indian army, had lived in—I met an entrepreneur from Shimla called Bakshi. He was restless with plans. Shimla was dead, he declared; it had been killed by tourism. Mashobra could be a wonderful alternative to those who loved quiet places in the hills. He set up some multicolored tents on his property and had some partial success, I think, with backpacking students. On cool summer nights, I saw bonfires and heard sounds of singing. But the summer remained serene for the rest of the village.

This suited me fine when I went to the village to eat at a cheap dhaba, or roadside eatery. The food was unremarkable, the menu unchanging. There was frequently a lot of something called "mixed dhal," which was all people could afford by way of dhal in those days of postliberalization inflation. I sat alone on the wooden bench and read censorious articles in the local Hindi-language daily, Punjab Kesari, about masturbation (bad, apparently, for eyesight) and blue jeans (bad for blood circulation). It was the only newspaper I read regularly in Mashobra. Occasionally, I bought and read an English-language paper, only to discover how little I had missed it. The anti-Muslim pogroms and terrorist killings for the high causes of nationalism and separatism, the corrupt politicians and their banal speeches, the dowry-related murders and suicides in small towns, the favorite color of the latest Indian to be crowned Miss World or Miss Universe—this cruel, garish world of middle-class India felt remote, even slightly pointless in Mashobra, and I was happy to think that I had managed to escape from it.

On the way back from lunch I would stop at the post office, a large dusty room with a disused telephone booth and an old damaged clock. There would often be a few men there—mostly servants from the big and empty houses—sending money to the families they had left in villages beyond the mountains I saw from my cottage. They would ask me to write a few cryptic messages in Hindi on the small margins of their money-order forms. "Everything is fine," I usually wrote. "Use this money for your medicines. I will send more soon." Or: "I am sorry I could not send you more money. I have not heard from you for a long time. I am very worried. I pray that you are well."

Poverty had brought them out of their homes. But it hadn't forced them into the vicious slums of Delhi and Bombay or into one of the countless shantytowns across India. For them, as much as for me, Mashobra had its deprivations. Yet the village also made possible a life of some dignity and leisure—which is rarer than it seems in India, where poverty and deprivation are always relative. In Mashobra, not comfortable but sheltered from the meanness and cruelty of the larger world, I began to write. I experimented with various novels, wrote reviews, essays and a travel book. My world slowly expanded. I began to travel and write on politics and current affairs for American and British papers.

These assignments, which brought me at last a kind of middle-class security, often kept me out of Mashobra for months. On returning once to the village after a longish absence, I learned that Mr. Sharma's mother had passed away the previous week. The owner of the dhaba I ate at collapsed one morning after his bath. Bakshi died, and the brightly hued tents on his property disappeared and were replaced by tall wild grass. Wildflower Hall was burned down in one of the mysterious fires that have claimed many old buildings in the area. People got married, found work and moved away.

There were other changes.

I returned to Mashobra each time in the past three years to find that the forces of globalization, which had exposed me to the wider world and had made writing a viable career, had also touched the small village. Tropicana orange juice is now available at grocery stores refitted with new Formica-topped counters and iceboxes. A five-star hotel now stands in place of Wildflower Hall. Real estate speculators with alleged "Gulf" connections have built new flats, offered them at ridiculously high prices and sold them to suspiciously rich army officers. I got a telephone and an Internet connection installed in my cottage. Cable TV came to Mashobra—white coaxial wires, strung tightly across electric poles, penetrating even the flimsiest shack in the village.

But it is easy to get carried away by the clichés of globalization and assert that these changes speak of an ever-shrinking world. On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, a friend in Calcutta rang to tell me about the extraordinary scenes unfolding on his TV screen. I had no TV or radio with me, and Mr. Sharma was reluctant to turn on his television set during his hour of prayer. It was two days later that I watched the images of the burning and collapsing towers on a small, grainy black-and-white screen in the tin shack of a hunch-backed peasant who worked in the orchard around my cottage. Around me swarmed his large family, busy cooking a meager meal over a kerosene stove in one corner of the shack. They weren't sure why I, the seemingly well-off man in the big cottage, was present in their cramped quarters, watching intently one of the many random images they saw every day and quickly forgot.

One often hears this claim: that the new ease of travel and communication has given all the peoples of the world a common present. But the indifference of the people in the shack seemed to say something else: that this endless present is meaningless when it is not based on a common past and does not ensure a shared future. For better or worse, the many crises of a globalized world—terrorist attacks, regime changes, epidemics, faltering economies—still seem remote in Mashobra. The nightmares of a history that is now truly universal pass lightly over its inhabitants.

Sometimes I envy them their indifference. I once had it myself, but I know that I cannot repossess it. Once uprooted, you are likely to stay on the road. And what you learn while on it—mainly your own insignificance and powerlessness—can't be unlearned. It can only be alleviated. And so on days when I am far away from Mashobra, I often lapse into my earliest, still comforting fantasy of the village: as a place largely exempt from the curse of "current events," to which I can return in order to live again, however briefly, a simpler, if no longer self-enclosed, life.

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