A weekend at Aanandaa
I had originally planned a much bigger trip for my birthday, but I was also going through a fairly low phase and, strangely, what I wanted most was to get away from everyone. I didn’t really want to celebrate or be around too many people. I wanted to disappear for a few days. I kept looking at different possibilities, but I delayed making a decision for so long that eventually I was looking for something much simpler, somewhere close to Delhi, somewhere I could get to easily and return from without too much fuss.
A friend recommended Aanandaa, a permaculture farm outside Chandigarh. I looked it up and immediately liked what I saw. What intrigued me even more was that you don’t simply book a stay there. You first fill out a form, and Manisha decides whether she would like to have you at the farm. I found that rather interesting. It suggested that the experience was not simply about providing accommodation, but about choosing the people with whom you wanted to share the space.
She said yes, I paid, and a few days later Sudhesh and I took the train to Chandigarh.
A driver came to receive us at the station and brought us to the farm. Manisha received us and showed us to our little guest accommodation, a simple living space connected to a bedroom and bathroom. The fact that she herself came to receive us felt like we had come to someone’s home and not a resort. It was only after spending some time there that I began to understand how much thought had gone into this place.
Manisha and Agam have been working on the farm for about fifteen years. When they bought the land, it was almost a desert. Everything that exists there now has been planted, built, experimented with and nurtured by them, together with their children, over all those years. Their children grew up with the farm as their holiday destination. Instead of being taken elsewhere, they spent their holidays there, and even their school projects often grew out of what was happening on the land.
A few years ago, Manisha left her corporate career to devote herself to the farm full-time. The guest accommodation was built using rammed earth by people who came from Pondicherry. The flooring and many of the other elements around the property are the result of experiments carried out over the years. There are little discoveries everywhere. You turn a corner and find another plant, another material, another solution, another detail that someone has thought carefully about.
Perhaps because I have had a terrace garden for more than a decade, I was particularly curious about what was growing. I wanted to know what the plants were, how they were being grown and what food they were producing. It was spring, and the whole place was full of poppies. The fields around the farm were green and luminous, and there was a sense of abundance that was very different from the cultivated gardens I am used to.
At the same time, I had gone there wanting to be left alone. I wasn’t particularly interested in interacting with people. Initially I was quiet, and then we realised that our meals were going to be shared with Manisha and Agam. The food was cooked in their kitchen and served in their dining room.
One of the things I hadn’t anticipated was how much I would enjoy the food. Usually, when I travel these days, I find myself worrying after a day or two about what I’m eating. Restaurant food, heavy meals and eating out constantly begin to make me feel uncomfortable. At Aanandaa, it was completely different. All three meals were home-cooked, and almost everything that appeared on the table came from the farm. There were seasonal chutneys and pickles, vegetables and food that had been cooked slowly and simply. We ate all three meals with Manisha and Agam, and, rather unexpectedly, we really pigged out.
There was something deeply luxurious about it. Not luxury in the conventional sense, but the luxury of eating food that had come from the land around us, cooked at home according to the season, and then sitting down to eat it slowly. The food became part of the experience of the farm, another expression of the attention that had gone into creating the place.
One meal became another, and gradually the conversations became warmer. Sudhesh also found a great camaraderie with Agam, and by the third day our conversations around the dining table felt less like those of people who had met only a couple of days earlier and more like conversations between old friends.
At some point Manisha asked me what I did. I told her that I ran Pure Ghee Designs. She immediately said, “I have a bag of yours.”
I have heard this many times over the seventeen years that I have been running Pure Ghee. People sometimes tell me that they bought something from Pure Ghee years ago, and while I am always pleased to hear it, I didn’t think much of it when Manisha said the same thing. Then she told me that she had kept the bag and that it was still one of her favourites.
The next day she brought it out.
She had actually kept it.
There was something unexpectedly moving about seeing that old bag in her hands. It wasn’t simply that the bag had survived for more than a decade. It was that someone had lived with something I had made, carried it, valued it and kept it all these years. Until that moment, Manisha and I had been two people who happened to be spending a weekend together.
Suddenly there was a history between us that I hadn’t known existed.
Our conversations opened up after that. She somehow understood that I was exhausted, that I had been carrying a lot of uncertainty about Pure Ghee and about where I wanted to go next. After seventeen years, I had begun questioning what I was doing and whether I had the energy to continue.
She told me that I had built something over seventeen years and that I couldn’t simply let it go. Then she made a rather provocative observation that made me laugh but also stayed with me. Men in middle age, she said, go out and buy expensive cars or have affairs. Women, when they reach menopause, sometimes dismantle everything they have built.
There was humour in the way she said it, but there was also something uncomfortably true about it. I had been feeling as though I needed to abandon or reinvent everything, when perhaps what I actually needed was to find a different way of tending what I had already built.
And that word, tending, became increasingly important to me over the course of the weekend.
Because what I was experiencing at Aanandaa was not simply a beautiful farm or an example of sustainable living. I was experiencing what happens when someone gives sustained attention to something for fifteen years. You can feel the decisions in the landscape. You can see the patience, the failures, the experiments and the care. You can feel the people who have done all of this.
I was also struck by the fact that Manisha is not only deeply connected to the land, but is an astute businesswoman. She has created systems and multiple revenue streams around Aanandaa that allow the farm to sustain itself. I found this particularly interesting because creative people often struggle with the structures that allow their work to survive. We can be deeply invested in the work itself and yet neglect the systems that support it, and eventually that can become another source of burnout. Watching the way she had thought about the farm as a living ecosystem as well as a sustainable enterprise gave me another perspective on my own work.
I spent the weekend eating, walking, looking, listening and taking photographs. I had imagined that I would draw while I was there, but I never actually found the time. Instead, I brought the photographs home with me. It was only after I returned that I began drawing from them: the poppies, the fields, the flowers and the feeling of being surrounded by things that were growing.
Perhaps that was the real gift of the weekend. I didn’t come back with answers, but I came back with a little more life and a renewed curiosity about my own work.
After I returned, Manisha and I continued our conversations. I discovered her interest in handlooms and realised how many other things we share: textiles, craft, food, land, making and a desire to live more deliberately. It made me think about the way our interests often come together around the things we choose to give our attention to.
There is something about tending that I find increasingly beautiful. When you tend something for long enough, it becomes more than a project. It becomes part of you, and eventually it begins to carry something of you back into the world.
For fifteen years, Manisha has tended Aanandaa. For seventeen years, I have tended Pure Ghee. Both began as things we chose to build, but over time they have become practices that ask something of us in return.
Perhaps that is what a sadhana is: something you return to, again and again, giving it your attention and allowing it to change you in the process.
And perhaps this is what happens when something has been tended with enough care for long enough. It begins to tend to you.
I went to Aanandaa because I wanted somewhere to disappear for my birthday. Instead, I found a place that reminded me to return: to my work, to looking, to making, and to the things I have already spent so many years building.
