The Lake That Knows All My Seasons

The 6:20 Shatabdi from Delhi to Kathgodam is more than a train to me.

It is a way out.

It leaves behind Delhi's heat, pollution, traffic, arguments, horns, crowds, and that constant feeling that everyone is late for something. For the first few hours, the view outside is familiar. Then, almost without announcement, the landscape begins to soften. There is more green. Rivers start appearing beside the tracks. By Haldwani and Kathgodam, the mountains are finally visible.

From there, the road begins to climb.

The air gets cleaner. The noise thins out. Lakes begin appearing between the hills. You smell damp grass, leaves, and something fresh that I have never been able to name properly. By the time I reach Nainital, I already feel further away from whatever version of life I boarded the train with.

I have made this journey many times. Sometimes with money, sometimes almost broke. Sometimes in love, sometimes after it. Sometimes certain about my life, and sometimes with no idea what I was doing.

The route was often the same. The person arriving never was.

The first morning I remember

I had visited the mountains when I was very young. I even remember seeing snowfall, but those memories are faint. They feel more like photographs somebody described to me than experiences I can fully enter again.

My first proper mountain memory is from Class 8.

One day, my father told me he had been invited to speak at a college in Nainital. We were leaving in an hour. Did I want to come?

Of course I did.

I packed one change of clothes and left with him.

The next morning, I opened my eyes in what I think was the college guest house. The room was warm and comfortable, while the air outside carried the sharp cold of the hills. I remember the bed. I remember how good the mattress felt. I remember looking around the room and thinking it was luxurious.

I grew up in a very middle-class home. Small comforts did not feel small to me. A beautiful room, a soft bed, a well-laid breakfast, or a cup of tea made with a good tea bag could feel like a glimpse into another kind of life.

Perhaps my earliest ideas of luxury began in Nainital.

The college gathering was somewhere higher up in the hills. There was food I considered fancy, although I cannot now remember everything that was served. I remember how it felt more clearly: flowers, trees, langurs, cold air, and the pleasure of sitting quietly while the adults did whatever adults do at conferences.

I was not trying to cover attractions or make an itinerary. I was simply observing. The mountains gave me enough to look at.

Later, back in town, my father met his old friend Rajiv Lochan Shah. From Nainital we continued towards Corbett, where another of his friends had a resort. That, too, felt impossibly new to me.

It was a short trip, but some memories carry their own fragrance. This one still smells of clean rooms, unfamiliar food, trees after cold air, and the excitement of having left home with only an hour's notice.

Khurpatal, after Class 12

The second important trip came after I finished Class 12.

I was a science student, but I knew I was not headed towards IIT, DTU, or one of the engineering colleges everyone around me seemed to treat as the natural destination. I was trying to decide what to do next, without having enough experience to know what any of the choices would actually mean.

My father had been invited to speak at a three or four-day retreat near Nainital, so I went with him.

That was my first memorable journey on the morning Shatabdi to Kathgodam. Even the train felt luxurious. Breakfast arriving at the seat was an event. I enjoyed every small part of it. From Kathgodam, we took a bus, ate bhutta on the way, and reached Nainital in the easy happiness that comes when a trip has properly begun.

After spending some time near the lake, we continued to Khurpatal.

Our destination was Dynasty Resort, set in a valley beside the lake. I stayed there for a few days surrounded by green hills, clear air, and the kind of quiet in which your own thoughts finally become audible.

The buffet felt like heaven to me. Toasted bread with butter. Pasta. Tea made half with milk and half with cream. These were not extraordinary things, but I had not yet learned to pretend that ordinary pleasures were beneath me. I loved them completely.

Across from the resort was a small hut where a very cool guy played music through a large pillar speaker. The songs travelled across the open ground. Children played cricket there, and I joined them. When I was not playing, I spent long stretches looking at the mountain flowers and plants, trying to understand how everything grew so differently from home.

Somewhere in that mix of music, cricket, buffet breakfasts, flowers, and unhurried time, I made a decision.

I would not study engineering. I would pursue a BBA and use the time around college to intern, work, and learn things in the real world.

It did not arrive like a cinematic revelation. No clouds parted. I simply had enough silence to hear what I already knew.

On that trip we also visited the resort near Corbett again. We bought a crate of litchis on the way. I remember that detail because memory is strange: it does not always preserve the important-looking parts. Sometimes it keeps the fruit bought beside a road, a song from a distant speaker, or butter melting into hot toast.

When the town became mine

For my earliest visits, Nainital belonged to my father. I went because he was going. He introduced me to the route, the people, and the possibility of leaving the plains for a few days.

Then came the first trip with my own friends.

My best friend, four or five others, and I planned it one evening and left the next day. There was no conference, retreat, or adult itinerary waiting for us. For the first time, the trip was ours.

After that, the journeys began to multiply.

Once, my friend Bhavit and I decided around midnight that we should spend New Year's 2020 in the hills. A few hours later, we were on the 6:20 Shatabdi. It remains one of my happiest impulsive decisions.

Another time, a client had called my team to Ramnagar, but the plan kept changing. Eventually, we were told that before reaching Ramnagar we would need to quarantine somewhere in Uttarakhand for seven days. We took a shared taxi around nine or ten at night. On the way, I messaged Airbnb hosts without knowing where we would sleep the next morning.

One host, Charu Joshi, replied.

At around seven, we arrived at his collection of wooden cabins high above Bhimtal, then called Baakhei. The property was surrounded by pear, hill lemon, mango, and guava trees. What began as a logistical complication turned into its own small life. We kayaked, trekked, ate local food, and sang with a cab driver we met there. A dog from the property began joining me on treks as if it had been assigned to show me the hills. Charu became a friend, and I returned to stay there several times.

That is one of the things I love about this region. A plan can fail completely and still deliver you somewhere worth remembering.

A town made of small things

Some places are remembered through monuments. I remember Nainital through small shops, smells, food, and repeated rituals.

I remember working for hours from I Heart Cafe in Mehragaon, and the momos and tea available right beside it. Around Bhimtal, food is part of the private map too: Chai Etc, listed on Google Maps as Grill & Drinks, for momos and tea, and Oye Fatafat, beside Bhimtal Lake, for momos and other snacks.

I remember The Modern Book Store, where a book lover can lose track of time and where I once found the candy cigarettes we used to eat as children. I remember Sakley's, an old bakery with the sort of charm that belongs naturally to Nainital, and Saiba's cream rolls. I remember the little tea factory among the trees at Ghorakhal, and walking along Mall Road without needing anywhere particular to go.

There is the shop with old wooden toys and musical instruments. The candles. The Gurudwara at Mallital. Raj Bhavan. Boating on the lake. The traditional dolls sold near Khurpatal.

None of these things needs to be spectacular on its own. Together, they form a private map.

I know where I like to stop. I know which turns make me slow down. I know how the lake looks in different moods. I know that some memories belong to the place, some to the people I was with, and a few are better left with the mountains.

Nainital has always been good at keeping them.

The trip when I had lost

Not every journey began in happiness.

At one point, I was in Pondicherry trying to build a restaurant. I eventually had to accept that the business strategy was not working and could not become profitable in its existing form. I had lost a lot of money. I was in debt, and I decided to close it.

It was one of the most negative periods of my life. Failure is difficult enough on its own. Financial failure adds numbers to every fear. You wake up with calculations in your head and go to sleep with the same calculations still unfinished.

Around that time, my friend and business partner Sarthak travelled to Delhi just to meet me. He took me with him towards Nainital. On the way to Almora, we stayed at Blue Lotus Resort, an isolated place beside a river.

The most important moment of that trip was not a viewpoint or a meal. It happened when my friend took me to a good cafe and bar, sat with me, and asked how I was actually doing.

He told me not to worry about the money. The restaurant had closed, and that was okay. He was with me.

One evening, Sarthak played the flute outside while the mountains disappeared into the dark. It was a small, gentle moment in a period when very little felt gentle.

Sometimes friendship is not advice. It is someone refusing to let you face a bad season alone.

I do not remember whether the mountains solved anything. They probably did not. The debt did not disappear when I looked at the river. The failed business did not become successful in retrospect. But the trip gave me distance from the panic, and my friend gave me something more useful than a solution: the feeling that my life was larger than that one failure.

Nainital had seen me excited by a soft mattress and a buffet breakfast. It had seen me choose a career. Now it saw me after a dream had gone wrong.

It made room for that version of me too.

The stories the lake keeps

I have visited Nainital while lost and while certain. I have gone when I had money and when I did not. I have taken friends, colleagues, and most of the people dearest to me.

I have been there in love and after heartbreak.

Over the years, love and Nainital became difficult to separate in my memory. Certain bends in the road began to feel like old conversations. The lake reflected different versions of my happiness, and familiar walks gathered new meanings each time I returned.

Maybe that is why my love for Nainital cannot be separated neatly from the love I have carried there. A place becomes part of your life by holding what you bring to it. Over time, the boundary blurs. You no longer know whether you miss the town, the person you were there, or the people who walked beside you.

Perhaps it is all the same kind of longing.

Every time I return

Nainital can never become old or boring to me.

I do not need a new attraction. I do not need a packed itinerary. Sometimes walking along Mall Road is enough. The lake is there, the cold settles in, shops begin to light up, and the air carries that familiar mixture of water, trees, food, and evening.

The town is not unchanged, of course. No place is. But it has remained steady enough for me to measure my own life against it.

The Class 8 boy who packed one change of clothes would recognise the excitement. The confused student in Khurpatal would recognise the quiet. The friend who arrived after closing a restaurant would recognise the relief of not having to solve everything immediately.

Sooner or later, I find myself returning to the same journey: Delhi behind me, the plains turning green outside the window, the first mountains appearing near Kathgodam.

Every time, Nainital is waiting.

Every time, I arrive as someone new.