Would you like a Shih Tzu puppy?” asked the affable young man working for Pawan Hans upon my arrival at Dehradun Airport — he was overwhelmed with a litter of five-week-old puppies. (Pawan Hans, a government-run helicopter service, operates flights to remote parts of India.)
The offer was unusual, but since I already live with three dogs, I declined. Besides, my mind was more on the Kasar Devi Temple. I was reaching it by chopper to a band-aid-sized airport at Almora, the closest town.
Lifting from Dehradun, fields and forests unfurled beneath me, silver rivers wreathed through scattered villages. Hills rose and folded into deep green valleys, terraced with gold and dusty emerald shades of leaf cover. Near Almora, pines thickened, the air sharpened, snow-hatted mountains appeared like joinery between earth and sky.
A dirt track led me to The Kumaon, a ten-bedroom luxury boutique hotel founded by Dr Vikrom Mathur, an eminent environmentalist with a doctorate from Oxford University; he helms Transitions Research, a cutting-edge think tank in North Goa. Mathur and his business partners commissioned Colombo-based Zowa Architects, the studio co-founded by Jineshi Samaraweera and Pradeep Kodikara, to create a property — also my home through my visit — that is a masterclass in sensitive, site-responsive architecture.
Special to The Kumaon is how its form dissolves into the landscape. Low-key luxe rooms with private terraces overlook layered natural courtyards, the creation palette chiefly locally sourced stone, bamboo — and poured concrete. Rooms and galleries effortlessly frame glorious views of Himalayan caps. Kodikara and Samaraweera ran with the baton of Sri Lanka modernism and pitched camp in the Himalayas to create a design language that is its own singular thing.
On my evening walk, through oaks and myrtles, the terrain burned with a powerful, noble quality. A leopard had recently attacked a cow, which the villagers had buried where it was found. A few stones marked the gravesite; even at a site of loss, sacred air persisted. In the distance, rhododendrons bloomed — red, wild, and true — and a scent of lichen, rain-soaked earth, dry leaves; something timeless.
***
Driving through narrow, circuitous roads to the temple, I passed stores stocked with local honey and nettle tea, boutiques that worked with women’s collectives to make woollen toys for children, and cafés with million-dollar views but ugly furniture, selling sad slices of apple crumble. A renaissance on the slopes brought in Russian and Israeli tourists by the truckload (quite literally — big groups rattling along in open trucks).
Dr Mathur accompanied me to Kasar Devi, telling me how he first came here as a child, enchanted by the small town of Almora and the decency of the locals, but mostly by the jungle further up, surrounding the ancient temples of Jageshwar. Here cedars stand in tall stillness, like monks absorbed in prayer; the hill fox urges cries of panic among ghostly-looking langurs. A Himalayan whistling thrush propels a song, a silvery question in the cold. The Kumaon had been his long-cherished dream — to create a refuge here for his children, and in doing so, he had created an elegant haven for other explorers as well.