“This place is straight out of a storybook!”

This is what every guest who visits Kudrat, a boutique homestay in the Tirthan Valley of Himachal Pradesh, thinks. Host Sudhir Nehru (44) agrees. Named after their daughter, Kudrat is a labour of love by him and his wife, Bhawana Koundal. It enjoys a beautiful prequel journey — which has become Sudhir’s favourite story to tell.

To hear it, you’ll have to visit the adjacent forest, where he enjoys his evenings in a small clearing of the land. It’s paradoxically quiet here. Even in the silence, there is a cacophony — the river and the birds never stop chatting. Kudrat is a utopian vision come true; one that Sudhir says involved three years and a lot of “gut feelings”.

And here’s where he begins his tale.

‘I wanted to live in the mountains’

There should be a signboard somewhere urging guests to look right and left while at Kudrat. If they don’t, they’ll miss the red fox, flying squirrel, mountain goat, and leopard, who are regulars here.

“As a Kashmiri born in Nagaland, I loved the mountains. But engineering took me to the city,” Sudhir begins. The corporate hustle shoehorned him into a vicious cycle of work, rigidly structured weekends, and a silent hope that Mondays would take a rain check.

But, every story has a plot twist. Sudhir and Bhawana’s was in 2012 when they were bitten by the backpacking bug. “We set out with two bags, travelled across India and Europe for months at a stretch, only........

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