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| Saaremaa front verandah - best place on a warm summer day! |
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| Saaremaa back verandah and terrace - for all seasons! For the best views and star gazing |
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| Saaremaa rooftops - wonderful to hear the rain and hail under them! |
Saturday, 12 July 2014
Saaremaa verandahs and terraces
Tuesday, 10 June 2014
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
Sunday, 23 September 2012
Time spent at' Hiiumaa' and 'Saaremaa'
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| Saaremaa in the Himalayas |
Time
spent at Saaremaa and Hiiumaa
A lot of our time is spent in just sitting in the
various verandahs and terraces and taking
in the gorgeous and breathtaking view.
Along with the much written and legendary Haunted House ensconced on the top of
the mountain right in front of ours, we could also clearly see ‘Kaplani’
village, ‘Jabarkhet temple’ and the
famous ‘Sarkhanda Devi’ temple to the East. Of course, the TV tower, Oakville
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| 'Saaremaa' - back verandah |
Every winter, it snows three or four times at Saaremaa
but one New Year while we were there, it snowed! Although the snow around Saaremaa
melted very fast, it was definitely visible. The mountains in front were
covered with snow and already cars were on their way to Dhanaulti to see the
snow. The news flies fast and by breakfast time we could see a serpentine queue
of cars all going to get a glimpse and feel of the first snow of the year in
that area! We, on the other hand, drove in the other direction, up to Sister’s
bazaar, about 800 feet higher than Saaremaa and Hiiumaa in altitude, and saw
plenty of snow there. We did our usual walk around Language school, Lal Tibba, the cemetery and Char Dukan and there
was a bitter cold wind blowing. All these parts had significant amounts of
snow, much to our delight.
Sketching
and painting is another
favourite past time. Since our family is full of artists, all the pictures that
are hung up on the walls of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa are done by members of the
family and each one tells its own tale of the mountains and different parts of
the Himalayas. This way we can still remember
the old, raw beauty and splendour of the Himalayas of yester years. We
make sure there are plenty of crayons, oil pastels, paints and colour pencils for anyone to draw
the scenery and everchanging views. Just before ‘Holi’ a few years ago, I
painted some ‘rangoli’ on the inner verandah of Saaremaa, and surprisingly, it
still looks as good as new.
Reading still remains a hot favourite and we have made sure
all our book shelves are full of old (but gold!) National Geographics, Readers
Digests and novels for all ages and temperaments. There is a collection of
children’s books too, for all sizes, and of course books about birds and
animals of the Himalayas and the Jim Corbett series. The only rule with family
and guests is that they have to read the books while they are at Saaremaa and
Hiiumaa...and not allowed to carry any away, however tempting it may be.. even
if they are in the middle of a book. Unless of course, they exchange the book
taken with any they have brought with them. This rule has been prompted by the
heavy loads and cartons lugged by us all the way from Delhi in the way of
books, especially along the short cut to the house when no 4 wheel drive was
available. It was an unwritten deal that every trip we would carry at least ten
books with us but it sure took a toll on our backs!
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| The much sought after past time - sitting around the fire place! Although there is a small TV, it is only used for watching the news at times. |
Bird
watching just happens willy
nilly, while we sit around...delightful Himalayan birds of all sizes perch in
the Oak trees or simply come to peck at the crumbs we leave around outside the
verandahs in order to catch glimpses of the birds. We always keep our
binoculars and bird book -“Birds of Northern India” handy, so as to identify
the bird immediately! We plan to put up some proper bird feeders all over so
that we can feast our eyes on the variety of birds in that region.
Gardening
and planting is fun and we
have spent many a day with our ‘chowkidar’ doing that. From fruit trees to
‘deodar’ trees, from tomatoes and strawberries to mint and cucumber, from
exotic creepers to ornamental flowers,
we have done it all. Unfortunately, the wild hare, wild boar and other
little animals make short work of some of our painstaking planting, but it
doesn’t deter us... every time we come, there is always something of our
previous visit’s toil to enjoy and marvel at. There are plant nurseries close
by where we often get cuttings from and eagerly plant them.
The old, green wooden cupboard in the drawing room of
Saaremaa which is painted with flowers is a treasure trove of games for all ages. From the usual Monopoly, Scrabble, Pictionary, Ludo, Snakes
and Ladders, to a variety of other games, they are all there. There is also a
skipping rope, two pairs of binoculars and 4 badminton rackets tucked in the
cupboard for good measure. The children and adults alike put up the badminton
net and major tournaments are played in the patch of land just in front of
Saaremaa’s verandah! Air rifle shooting is a hot favourite too and many hours
have been spent shooting at a carefully made target (usually an upturned
plastic bottle) 20 – 25 metres away. The best game played with a little bonfire
set up in our outdoor fire place (‘angeethi’) is Dumb Charades. This is an all
time hot favourite. Of course, when the
weather gets too cold, we simply light the fire indoors and move in. That's when it's time for the guitar playing and singing to start! We have a book with guitar chords for songs from the '70's and '80's and sing to our heart's content while someone or the other plays the guitar.
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| The green cupboard with all the games and music beside it |
There are so many beautiful and mysterious trails all over our land and of course out of it too
when one leaves the gate - both to the Chamasari village and to Dhobi ghaat
side. On our land, some trails lead to one or the other of the benches made by
the chowkidar, helped by me and the children. Each of the four benches is at a strategic location and commands a
beautiful view. These benches have been tiled with left over tiles of all
colours, shapes and sizes ( broken and whole) from our house and each tells a
story. The very first bench we built was made by the chowkidar (helped by me)
in memory of my grandparents and has huge loving arms on either side. It is
hidden away as one turns the corner from our garden patch cum badminton court,
just away from Saaremaa and is the ideal place to recline on and read a book or
simply dose off. The second one we built (by the chowkidar, helped by kids) is
just near the back verandah and we sit on it and admire the view while having
our meals. The third one is in the shade of a large Pine tree on the upper
level of land and a perfect picnic spot ,
especially when we want the kids (our own and their cousins) to be less noisy
and away from us! The fourth and last bench built by the kids and their
cousins, is far up, right next to the upper most boundary of our land and lies
beside three walnut trees which actually yield walnuts. The view from each of
these benches is simply amazing. One of the paths leads to our organic waste collection
which is used over time for enriching the soil. We are always careful to
separate our organic and inorganic kitchen waste and make the most use of our
organic one for all our plants as the land is not very fertile and quite rocky
in parts.
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| The trail to our place |
Saturday, 22 September 2012
Hiiumaa
HIIUMAA
‘Hiiumaa’, the little annexe above Saaremaa, has also
been completed now and is comfortably furnished for all our family and guests
who fall in love with our home in the mountains and want to always visit again.
It boasts of a lovely, large, timber constructed bedroom with a verandah
overlooking the stupendous mountain view in the East. There is another little study
cum bedroom upstairs and a drawing and kitchen cum dining room downstairs .
Both floors have bathrooms. The best part of Hiiumaa are the two verandahs on
either end of the house and a dining room which is part of the open kitchen,
where we sit facing the full view of the mountains.
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| New ' Hiiumaa' seen when one looks upward from 'Saaremaa' |
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| Hiiumaa - part of the drawing room on the GF, looking into the kitchen..The 'bukhari' (wood stove) in the corner keeps the whole house warm |
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| Hiiumaa - upper floor landing looking into the main bedroom |
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| Upper bedroom balcony - a perfect place to sit |
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| Glimpse of FF bathroom ! |
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| View from Hiiumaa's drawing room |
Initially, Hiiumaa was a large single room or outhouse
and was built as a store to put all our cement
and other construction material, basically to keep it safe and protect
it all from the vagaries of mountain weather. However, we had to come quite
often to check on the work being done on the main house Saaremaa, and living
far away in town was counterproductive. We didn’t even have the motorbike then,
leave alone our 4 wheel Gypsy. So, we hit on a brainwave and decided to make a
temporary tin store for the building material and simply live in ‘Hiiumaa’, for
better or worse.
I clearly remember
the only trip we left our little son behind in Delhi with his
grandparents (he sweetly tags along with us everywhere usually!). We folded the
back seat of our car and filled it with four plastic chairs and a plastic
table, bedding, two cotton ‘durries’ (large woven mats), a few utensils, a
small one burner gas stove with a mini cylinder and basic groceries. We headed
off from our home in Delhi straight to ‘Saaremaa’, praying the traffic would be
okay and we would reach during daylight hours to set up ‘home’. We were lucky
and did manage, with two old kerosene
lamps helping us to see, while we put our meagre belongings into the one room
which would serve as our bedroom, drawing room, dining room and kitchen for the
next two years.
Slowly, with each trip, we added a few more articles
to our sparse home, like two tin trunks to store bedding (very much like the
trunks my grandparents had from their many postings all over India), an ugly
but much needed, small sized, Godrej almirah (steel cupboard), a solar torch
and 2 solar lights, and two proper beds from Landaur bazaar in main
Mussoorie which we realised were less
hardy than the folding beds we used earlier.
Little Hiiumaa did not even have a covered veranda and
I must say, we were very very lucky with the weather on all the occasions we
stayed there. We often cooked on a small stool set up outside and sat around it,
eating there itself. The outside was also our drawing room. Inside, other than
the two existing beds, a folding bed would be put up for our son at night which
would be dismantled and used as a sofa to sit in the sun in the morning. With
that 3rd bed, there was hardly place to move inside the room!
Anyway, with no electricity then, we had early nights and slept very deeply
indeed until the first rays of the sun would stream through the windows
beckoning us to another wonderful day in the Himalayas . Hiiumaa remains a bird watcher's paradise and we see the rarest and most beautiful birds while sitting on any of the verandah's around it.
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| An Oriental Turtle Dove perched on the Oak tree just outside the upper verandah of 'Hiiumaa' |
Those days and nights, with literally just a roof over
our heads and precious little else, were easily the best ones I remember.
Washing utensils was done outside and bathing was not done at all. In fact,
bathing and washing clothes were saved for when we went back to Delhi
Naming Hiiumaa
was not difficult! While we were in Estonia recently, we took the ferry from
‘Haapsaalu’ on the westernmost coast of Estonia across to Hiiumaa, the second
island adjacent to main Estonia, just north of Estonia’s other island,
Saaremaa. We lived in a beautifully constructed log cabin along the sea. Once
we named our main home ‘Saaremaa ’,
automatically the little room above got called ‘Hiuumaa’!
Our friends visited us at old Hiiumaa regularly and
they rightly called it the ‘boondocks’. They rather accurately commented that
either we were very brave or just extremely foolish. On looking back, I truly
wonder how we did it. However, I have to say that living in that little outhouse,
which is now the tastefully built up ‘new-look’ Hiiumaa, was the most
humbling and rewarding experience of my
life. Something I will never forget and always cherish lovingly. So much so,
that when main Saaremaa was finally built by
April 2009, it was with a heavy heart that I packed our belongings and moved
down. Our days of ‘house house’, as our friends called it, were over, and the
real world was beckoning with a fully fledged house, namely Saaremaa, waiting
for us.
'Pari Tibba'
‘Pari Tibba’ or ‘Witch’s Hill’
near ‘Saaremaa’
Unfortunately, while working hard to set up ‘Saaremaa’
and tie up all the loose ends one encounters while building a place in the
remote areas, we hardly got around to visiting the beckoning neighbourhood and also following the inviting little mountain
forest trails, seemingly leading nowhere. However, one afternoon in 2010, when
my sister and family were here visiting over the summer, we decided to at least
go up to the famous ‘Pari Tibba” which the renowned author Ruskin Bond has
written so enchantingly about in quite a few of his books. We thought that the
least we could do was to visit the site our hill was named after! It was a
pretty hectic, though beautiful climb, filled with Oak and Pine trees along the
way.
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| The trail to 'Pari Tibba' |
On reaching the top of the hill, we saw ‘trishuls’ (three pronged forks which
the Hindu Lord Shiva holds) on typical Garhwali stone shrines dedicated to Lord Shiva, with red and
gold dupattas draped over them. There was a barbed wire fencing which had been
broken down purposefully. The multiple land deals in these areas are famous and
land changes hands through fake papers too often for comfort. Each so called
‘owner’ puts up his boundary wall or wire , only to be broken down by another
‘owner’ claiming the land is his! Then this boundary is once again broken down
by another ‘owner’ of the same land who says he has just bought it! The
‘dalals’ or land brokers make a pretty penny over these transactions, no doubt.
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| One of the shrines on 'Pari Tibba" |
And then, after much huffing and puffing, we saw it!
The famous little ramshackled house with the ‘pari’ (fairy) fable attached to
it. So, this was the house which the entire mountain side had been named
after…. there were a few half-broken walls still standing and a small courtyard
kind of space in the centre. The fable goes that some British ladies were
trying to build the house about two centuries ago and whatever they would build
during the day would be broken down by fairies (‘pari’ in Hindi) at night. The
villagers still hold true that the fairies or pari’s from Pari tibba did not
like the house being constructed and would dismantle it every night. Obviously,
there was more to the building and breaking, probably the villagers wanting a
cut from the land deal, but I really liked this mystery story surrounding our
mountain!
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| The mysterious 'pari' (fairy) house behind the tree on 'Pari Tibba' |
We went further to find a large temple cum make shift home
being constructed on the other side. The view was simply fantastic and we could see
the majestic mountain ranges all over. There was no water connection so all
construction was being done using rainwater in a rather effective way. The rain
water was being collected in a large, black, plastic sheet held down by stones
over a depression in the land. It’s amazing how the villagers contrive to use
rain water with little ‘parnalis’ of all shapes and sizes placed on their terraces which lead into large and small drums below, while in the cities, rain water
harvesting is still not too common a sight. I suppose necessity is the mother
of invention!
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