The Road Home

There are some roads you can forget—the road to an old school, the road to a first job, the road you once travelled every morning without thinking about it. Then there are roads that remain somewhere inside you, even when you have not seen them for years. The road to my village was one of those roads. For thirteen years, I had not taken it. The village had slowly become a collection of fragments in my memory: a stone courtyard, an old wooden door, the smell of woodsmoke coming from the kitchen, a narrow trail between fields, the sound of someone calling my name from across the house, and the mountains that, as a child, seemed to stretch endlessly into the sky. Life had given me enough reasons to postpone the journey. There was work, money, responsibilities, plans and the endless feeling that there would always be a better time to return. Thirteen years passed almost unnoticed.

When the Plains Become Mountains

The journey began in the plains, where the roads were wide and the traffic impatient. Slowly, the landscape began to change. Buildings became fewer, fields appeared between settlements, and the road began following the shape of the mountains instead of moving in a straight line. The air felt different too. It was cooler, sharper and somehow familiar. At a small roadside tea stall, the driver stopped for a few minutes. There was an old wooden bench beneath a tin roof, a blackened kettle sitting over a small stove and two men discussing the affairs of the world as though they had been appointed to solve them. I ordered a cup of tea and stood looking towards the valley. The tea itself was ordinary, but the smoke from the stove, the cold air and the sound of the wind through the trees brought back something I had not expected. For a few minutes, I was not travelling towards the village. I was travelling backwards through memory.

A Landscape That Still Remembered Me

Mountain roads have their own rhythm. They refuse to be hurried. Every bend reveals another valley, another ridge, another cluster of houses scattered across the slopes. Some homes were freshly painted, while others stood with weathered walls and old slate roofs. A few were completely locked, their courtyards slowly disappearing beneath grass and weeds. Looking at them, I wondered about the people who had once lived inside. This is one of the quieter stories of Uttarakhand. People leave. They leave for Haldwani, Dehradun, Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai and places even farther away. They leave because there are better schools elsewhere, more reliable hospitals elsewhere and jobs elsewhere. The mountains teach people how to live with little, but they also teach them how difficult it can sometimes be to stay.

The Village Was Smaller Than I Remembered

When I finally reached the village, the sun was beginning to soften. The first thing I noticed was how small everything looked. As a child, the courtyard had seemed enormous. The path to the fields had felt like a long journey, and the mountains seemed impossibly high. Now I could cross the courtyard in a few steps. The path seemed shorter. The houses seemed smaller. Only the mountains remained exactly as large as I remembered. An old wooden gate stood where I remembered it. When I pushed it open, it made the same tired creaking sound. After thirteen years, I had expected everything to feel unfamiliar, but that sound immediately transported me back. It was as though the gate had been waiting patiently for me to return.

The Questions That Come With Home

There was no grand welcome. There did not need to be. Someone came outside, and within minutes came the familiar questions: When did you arrive? How long are you staying? How is everyone? Where are you working now? Why did you take so long to come? That final question stayed with me. Why had I taken so long? I had plenty of answers—work, money, responsibilities, plans and the usual business of life. But none of them really explained thirteen years. Perhaps that is how time disappears. Not through one major decision, but through hundreds of small postponements. There is always a reason not to return today, because tomorrow is supposed to be easier.

The Kitchen Had Not Changed

Inside the house, the kitchen was warm. A fire was burning, and someone was preparing tea. The smell of woodsmoke immediately filled the room, and with it came memories I had not consciously carried for years. Soon there was food on the table—dal, rice, vegetables and the familiar flavours of a Pahadi kitchen. Nothing was presented as a special meal. Nobody called it traditional cuisine. It was simply lunch. Yet sitting there, eating food prepared in the same place where I had eaten as a child, I understood something about food that cannot be found in menus. Some flavours are not recipes. They are memories. They belong to a particular kitchen, a particular person and a particular period of your life.

A Village Full of Empty Houses

That evening, I walked through the village. The houses looked peaceful in the fading light, but many were quieter than I remembered. Some doors were permanently locked. Others were used only during festivals or family visits. A few courtyards had become overgrown. The village had not disappeared, but parts of it had become silent. Every locked house seemed to carry a story of someone who had left. A son who found work in the city. A daughter who married elsewhere. A family that moved because the children needed better schooling. A farmer who could no longer make a living from the land. The migration of Uttarakhand is often discussed through statistics, but statistics cannot tell you what an empty courtyard feels like. They cannot tell you what it means when the house that once had voices, cooking fires and children running through it remains closed for most of the year.

The Man Who Remembered Everyone

The next morning, I met an elderly man sitting outside his house. I had known him as a child. He had seemed old to me then, and somehow he seemed even older now. We sat together in the morning sun, and he began pointing towards the opposite hillside. He named the people who had once lived in the houses there. One by one, he told me their names, their families and where they had eventually gone. He remembered people I had forgotten. He knew where an old water source used to be, which families owned particular fields and which path children once used to reach the school. He remembered when electricity first reached the village and when people gradually began leaving for the cities. Listening to him, I realised that a village is much more than its houses. It is an archive of people. Its history does not always exist in books or government records. Sometimes it exists in the memory of one elderly person sitting quietly in the winter sun.

What the Mountains Teach Us About Time

I asked him whether the village had changed. He laughed and said, “Everything changes.” Then he looked towards the mountains and added that the mountains do not hurry. The sentence stayed with me. In cities, we measure time through deadlines, salaries, appointments, school years and meetings. In the mountains, time has traditionally been measured differently—through seasons, sowing and harvesting, snowfall, festivals, marriages, births and departures. Perhaps that is why returning after thirteen years felt so strange. The village had changed slowly, but I had changed quickly. I had spent years measuring life by what came next. The village reminded me of a different way of measuring it: by what remains.

The Last Evening

On my last evening, I walked towards the edge of the village. The fields stretched quietly below, and the mountains beyond them were turning blue in the fading light. I remembered running through those fields as a child, without ever wondering who owned them or whether they would still be cultivated years later. Children rarely think about endings. They assume the people around them will always be there, that houses will always remain open and that familiar paths will never disappear. Growing older teaches us otherwise. Some people are no longer there. Some houses are locked. Some paths have disappeared. Some traditions survive only because one person still remembers how they were done.

I Did Not Take a Photograph

The valley looked beautiful that evening. I reached for my phone almost instinctively, wanting to capture the view. Then I stopped. For once, I did not want a photograph. I wanted to remember it without a screen between us. The layered mountains, the cold air, the fading sunlight and the quiet below seemed too personal to reduce to a picture. I simply stood there. Perhaps that was the real reason I had returned—not to document the village, but to experience it again.

The Road Back

The next morning, I left. There were packets of food for the journey, instructions to call when I reached and promises that I would return soon. I meant the promise. As the vehicle began moving away, I looked back at the village until the road curved and the houses disappeared. I had expected returning home to feel like recovering the past. Instead, it felt like meeting the past as a different person. The village had changed. The people had changed. I had changed. Some houses were empty, some faces were missing and some paths no longer existed. But the mountains were still there. The kitchen still smelled of woodsmoke. Someone was still making tea. Somewhere in that landscape was still the child I had once been—the child who believed the mountains went on forever.

What We Leave Behind

Perhaps that is why people return. Not because they expect to find the past exactly as they left it. We know that is impossible. We return because we want to see what survived, what disappeared and what quietly became part of us. Leaving the mountains can take only a morning. Leaving them behind can take a lifetime. You can build a life somewhere else, learn new roads, live among unfamiliar faces and become comfortable in another city. Yet somewhere inside you, there may always remain a stone courtyard, a wooden door, a smoky kitchen, a mountain trail and a road waiting to take you home.

And perhaps home is not always the place we return to.

Sometimes, home is the part of ourselves that returns with us.