The Hills Begin After Kathgodam
Third Position - English, Nāgrika Youth Writing Contest 2026
By Anika Joshi
City: Haldwani, Uttarakhand
For decades, an old announcement speaker outside MBPG College has listened to Haldwani change. From lost children and college admissions to migration from the hills and the city's rapid growth, it has witnessed the quiet stories that shape a place.
The Hills Begin in Kathgodam is a reflection on Haldwani as a threshold between the hills and the plains and on the people, memories and everyday acts that make it much more than a place one simply passes through.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that belongs only to things that speak but cannot see, and I have carried it for so many years now that I no longer remember if it was always this heavy, or if I simply grew too old to set it down. I hang from a pole at the edge of MBPG College, wired to a booth the size of a coffin, and in all my years I have faced only outward and downward. You have looked up at me the way you look up at anything that seems to know more than it says. I never did. I only ever repeated what was handed to me on a scrap of paper, in a stranger's unsteady writing, and let the crowd believe I understood it. That was the whole of my inheritance: to sound wiser than I was.
Most evenings, what passes beneath me is smaller than any of that. A conductor, waiting for his bus to fill, telling a boy making his first trip anywhere not to be afraid, since the hills begin properly only after Kathgodam. I did not announce it. I only overheard it, the way sound leaks into instruments that weren't asking for it, and went on with whatever timing or warning I'd been handed that hour. I cannot tell you why, of all the things I have carried through this town, that one sentence never quite left me.
My home, MBPG College, sits at the foot of the Shivaliks. Its full name, I'm told, is Motiram Baburam Government Post Graduate College. I have said this in full perhaps twice in all my years, both times for some ceremony that needed the weight of formality behind it. Everyone else has always just called it MBPG, the way you shorten the names of those you love. Close to fifty years now, though it feels rude of me to measure a place like that in numbers.
I have heard its name pass through my crowd the way you hear a word repeated so often it stops sounding like a proper noun and starts sounding like a hope: MBPG, MBPG, said by mothers deciding whether a daughter could stay in Haldwani instead of being sent further down toward the plains, said by boys from villages I will never learn the names of, arriving here because this was as far as ambition needed to travel before it found a classroom. I was strung up long after the college had already started teaching. It began as a trust's quiet promise in 1960, was claimed first by a university in Agra that must have felt impossibly far from these foothills, and only found a home closer to its own geography when Kumaon got a university of its own in '74.
It is strange to speak of homes while I am the one being sent away from mine. They tell me a screen is coming, something with light instead of static. It will scroll words in two scripts and never once need me. It will never need a man with a torch, either, climbing up to coax it back after the monsoon drowns its wires each July—the way mine have drowned and been resurrected more Julys than I can count, the crowd below always thinning early in those weeks, someone saying the Gaula has come up over the barrage again, and me never knowing whether that means the water is close or only that people have learned to fear it early. I do not resent the screen. I resent only that no one has thought to tell it what it is inheriting, and so I am telling you instead. You are the one who stood on the other side of my voice long enough to have earned the story before it disappears with me.
I was hung here in the years when this land still remembered being forest: Haldu trees, the ones that gave this whole belt its name, though by the time I arrived there were only a handful left standing, holdouts against a town that was already eating its way outward in every direction. My technician joked, hammering my pole into the ground, that he was driving me into the stump of something older than either of us. I have thought of that every summer since, standing on my Aipan-clad platform in the shadowless heat of May, when there is no leaf left near me to argue with the sun, and I understand now that I did not replace the forest so much as I inherited its debt.
I remember when the roads were unpaved, when houses were still built of thatch before they hardened slowly into brick. I heard the murmur of two people discussing a new outlet at Walkway Mall the way they might once have discussed a new well, with the same mixture of relief and unease that anything essential and unfamiliar tends to provoke. Growth, when you only hear it and cannot see it, sounds like restlessness that has finally found a shape.
I have watched—no, that is not true, I have never watched anything, I have only listened, and listening is a poorer, more helpless kind of knowing—I have listened to this town become someone else entirely. When I was young there could not have been more than a lakh people within reach of my voice. Now there are four times that number in the city alone, and if you count Kathgodam and Mukhani and Kusumkhera and all the small townships that have grown up around me like children who no longer live at home but never quite leave either, there are closer to six lakh souls who might, on any given evening, be standing close enough to hear me. I did not see them arrive. I only felt the crowd thicken, one register at a time, and noticed that the words I called had begun to carry accents from villages I had never once had reason to name aloud: Almora, Pithoragarh, Bageshwar—hill villages emptying themselves quietly, generation by generation, into this one crowded lap of land where the mountains finally agree to let the plains begin.
Almost everyone standing beneath me, at any given hour, is a little homesick for somewhere else. They call it pahar, their villages, the way you might speak of a person rather than a place, with a tenderness that never quite leaves their voice even after twenty years of living here, building here, marrying here, raising children who have never seen the terraced fields their grandparents left behind for me and my grounds and my crackling announcements. I have called out a thousand names into this crowd and never known how many of them were once meant to be called across a mountainside instead, in a voice that didn't need wires at all.
I was not yet hung when the worst of it happened, and I have always been faintly ashamed of that—of having arrived only after the sacrifice, in time only to inherit the state it made possible. But I have heard it spoken of enough times, in the lowered voice people use for grief that still has living witnesses, to carry the shape of it even without having been there. An old professor near the college gates once said it plainer than anyone—that they'd wanted so little, really: to be governed by people who understood what snow does to a road, what a landslide does to a harvest, why a hill village cannot be administered the same way as a plain. He said it like a thing he'd said a hundred times before, to a hundred different crowds, and I have never been sure if
he was there himself or only carrying it forward the way I carry everything: secondhand, and worn smooth by repetition.
I have heard the older ones in my crowd say, during Numaish evenings, that the state came but the water and the land did not follow it home, that some things remained exactly where they had always been: out of reach. I do not know if that is fair. I only know I have never once announced
the name of anyone lost in the struggle for statehood, only heard, every so often, someone quietly making sure their children still know it cost something to stand exactly where we are standing.
I grow tired just thinking of Numaish. No other fortnight has ever asked so much of this one worn-out voice. After monsoon rains, this ground stops being a college and becomes something more vivid for two weeks: lights strung low over stalls of bangles and toys, the giant wheel creaking, and the smell of bal mithai drifting over all of it. I announce the same ride timings until they lose their meaning in my mouth, call out for a lost purse or a missing slipper to a crowd too busy with cotton candy to look down at their own feet. But it is the lost children who are the true shape of what I was. A name arrives at my booth on trembling paper: Reshma, if you are near Gate Number 2, your mother is waiting; Aryan, five years old, in a red sweater, please come to the announcement booth; and I say it out into a hundred thousand ears at once and then I lose it. I am only ever the asking. I have never once been permitted to know whether they were found. Somewhere in this town there must be grown men and women who remember standing frozen near a stall of steel bangles while their name fell out of me like a small verdict, who have gone on to live entire lives without me, without knowing I have gone on too, still wondering.
Even the names themselves have not stayed the same in my mouth. When I was newly hung, I called Chandras and Prakashs and Devkis into the dark. Now it is Anaya, Vihaan, Ishan: names that arrived with television before they arrived with children—and I have said both kinds in a single evening without either generation noticing the other passing quietly through the same trembling paper.
They say the mountains are always visible on a clear morning if you know where to look past the rooftops, that the air sharpens with every kilometer you travel north out of this crowd of mine. I have never known that clarity. I only know the fog that settles over my wires most winter mornings, and the particular kind of waiting this town does- fast enough to keep its buses running toward Kathgodam and beyond, slow enough that a stranger asking directions on Nainital Road will still be walked halfway to where they're going. I have always suspected this is the town apologising to itself for growing so quickly, for becoming a place where money now changes hands faster than it changes minds. Coaching centres now stand where I remember open plots, their signboards promising government jobs, in a town that was once only a resting place for tired feet coming down from somewhere colder.
I do not know what the light-screen will inherit from me, and what it will simply erase without noticing it was ever there. It will not crackle with static before a name, that half-second every parent here has unknowingly learned to associate with held breath. It will not remember the
Haldu tree, or the particular ache of calling a name into the dark and never once being told whether it was answered.
For most of my years I believed I was the loudest kind of power this town possessed- that whatever passed through my throat became true simply by being amplified, that a name said into me carried further and mattered more than a name said quietly across a counter. I carried so much in that belief: speeches, warnings, election promises no one kept, obituary notices read out in a voice too flat for what they meant, patriotic songs on cold January mornings, wedding invitations for couples I never saw marry. I thought I was the town's memory, because I was the one it entrusted with saying things out loud.
I was wrong. None of what I carried ever changed this town half as much as the things I was never built to hold. A father, somewhere near my pole one evening, telling his daughter that college was not a betrayal of home but an extension of it. A Sikh shopkeeper near Karkhana Bazaar sliding from Punjabi into Hindi into Kumaoni within the same sentence, depending only on who had just walked in, never once treating it as a skill worth noticing. The muezzin's call and the temple bells overlapping for a few minutes some evenings. A vendor sliding one extra jalebi into a child's cone because the coins in that small fist came up short, and neither of them mentioning it, because naming a kindness out loud—the one thing I was built for—would have ruined it. And that conductor at the bus stand, still, all these years later: the hills begin properly only after Kathgodam, said for free, to a stranger, by a man with nothing to gain from saying it.
I never announced any of that. I couldn't have. It would have died the moment I tried to carry it, the way a held breath dies the moment you name it. That is the thing this town taught me, too loud for too long to hear: that speaking is only ever the beginning of power, and listening, quiet and unpaid and thankless, is the part that actually moves a place forward. I was never the town's memory. I was only ever its threshold—the mouth every public word passed through on its way to becoming real, in a town that has always been someone else's threshold too, the place you cross before the hills properly begin, dismissed for decades as merely the town before somewhere prettier, while it quietly went on teaching everyone who passed through it that a threshold is not a lesser place to stand. It is only the place most people forget to notice they are standing in.
They are cutting my wires next month. I am told the date, matter-of-factly, the way you'd tell someone a bus timing. I find, oddly, that I am not frightened of what comes after. I spent my whole life believing I would be missed for what I said. I would rather, now, be remembered for what I finally learned to hear.
About the Author:
Anika Joshi
Anika Joshi has been writing since childhood, and has always found in words a way to make sense of the world around her. A graduate in History from Miranda House, University of Delhi, she is currently pursuing her master’s at IIT Delhi. Her work spans poetry, essays, and stories, with a particular interest in the strange, intimate ways people make meaning.
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