I come to Dehradun often. My parents live here (whenever they are not with us in Banglore), so every wedding, every function, every long break — the road eventually leads back to this city. This time it was a cousin's wedding. Same routine: land, hug everyone, eat too much, catch up on a year in three days, fly back.
My parents had been asking us for years to bring the kids to the village. They should see it. They should know where you came from. Every visit, it would come up. Every visit, we'd nod, smile, and say next time, definitely next time.
This time, after the wedding, my wife and me looked at each other and finally said it out loud — why not this time.
Not Dehradun. The actual village. The one an hour past Devprayag, deep enough into the mountains, the place which we owned during summers in our childhood.
The place no one goes anymore
When I was a kid, that village was the center of our world every summer. Every uncle, every aunt, every cousin would land up there for a few weeks. The house would be full. There would be many meals being cooked throughout the day, kids running in and out, someone shouting for someone, and a constant low hum of relatives arguing about whose turn it was to fetch something. It wasn't a holiday. It was a small festival that lasted a month.
I wish I could find those photos, but it was not an era of mobile phones. Maybe somewhere in an uncle's drawer or an aunt's old album, there must be pictures of all of us — ten, twelve cousins crammed, grinning at a camera that someone had to wind.
Now no one goes. Not really. The cousins are scattered across cities and continents. The uncles are older. Everyone meets in Dehradun when there's a wedding, eats well, takes a group photo, and goes home.
The village just… sits there. Quietly. Waiting.
The drive my kids couldn't believe
We drove up. Past Rishikesh, past Devprayag, and then off the main road into the smaller ones that wind through the hills and the beautiful river below.
At some point my son asked, "How long did you take to get here when you were a kid?"
That's when I told them the part they didn't know.
There was no road to the village when I was their age. Not a real one.
The bus would drop us off somewhere on the main route, and from there it was a 30 to 40 minute walk — uphill, with bags, with whatever cousins had insisted on bringing. By the time we reached the house, our cousins were already laughing at us for taking so long.
My kids found this fascinating. The idea that their dad had to walk to a village. That cars couldn't go everywhere. That you could be somewhere without a road to it.
I realized something a little sad in that moment: I'd never told them any of this before. Not because I was hiding it — just because it had never come up. We talk about school, about football, about what's for dinner. We don't talk much about where we came from. And they're curious. More curious than I'd given them credit for.
The fields, the wind, the spot
The village itself hasn't changed as much as I'd feared. Our fields are still there — terraced into the hillside, the way my grandparents shaped them with their hands a generation ago. I used to spend full days on those fields as a kid, helping in the way kids help, which is mostly being in the way 🙂
I showed the kids the fields. I showed them how the mountains open up on every side. We stood at the edge of the slope and felt the wind come rushing up the valley — that specific afternoon wind that you don't get anywhere else, the kind that makes you close your eyes for a second whether you mean to or not.
They stood there and just stared. You forget, living in a city, what it does to a child the first time they see real mountains with no concrete anywhere in sight, no buildings cutting the horizon — just hills folding into hills, all the way out.
And then I took them to my spot.
There's a place in the house, where I used to sit for hours as a kid with whatever book I was reading that summer, when I was younger. Just me and the book and the wind. No one came looking because no one needed to. You can't really get lost in a place where everyone knows everyone.
I was a different feeling sitting at the same spot with my wife and showing her mountains that haven’t changed for so many years. We all changed, but there are some constants, like these mountains.
I sat there again, 25–30 years later, and it felt exactly the same. Same wind. Same view. Same quiet.
I didn't expect that.
What the kids saw
I went into this trip thinking I was giving the kids a piece of my history. Showing them the place. Ticking a box. Look, this is where Dad grew up in summers.
What I didn't expect was for them to love it the way they did. Not politely-loved-it. Actually loved it. They wanted to know everything — what we ate, what we played, who slept where, whether there were ghosts (there were always ghosts, every village has them) or animals, what we did when it rained. They were asking questions I hadn't thought about in decades.
And they were doing the same things I used to do. Picking up things from different rooms. Standing at the edge of the slope to feel the wind. Sitting on a rock and just being for a while, which is something city kids almost never get to do.
It made me a little nostalgic. But what made me happier was that the place still works. Whatever it gave me as a kid — peace, space, a sense that the world is bigger than your own head — it gave to them too. In one afternoon.
What I'm taking back
A few things, written down before I forget:
- I should bring them back. Not for a wedding. For the village itself.
- I should talk to them more about the childhood I had. They want to hear it. I just have to start.
- I hope all of us cousins can bring our kids there together one summer. The same place. The same fields. A house full again, even if just for a few days. Our children meeting the way we used to meet. That would be something.
And now my kids know how to find it.