A year of intentional living in Dehradun began in a house built in 1945. No AC. No geyser. Immersion rods for hot water. Workers who leave the mess for you to clean. The honest account of the move and what it taught me that a decade in metro cities had not.
The house was built in 1945.
The portion my wife’s uncle had lived in was abandoned fifteen years before we arrived. A large section—rooms, a kitchen, and a long verandah—had quietly become a ruin. Plaster coming off walls. Fixtures that had crossed the line from old into broken. The kind of accumulated neglect that happens when nobody is looking and nobody is responsible.
We spent months on restoration.
Not renovation in the sense anyone from a city would recognize. Not choosing tiles from a showroom or supervising a crew that arrives on time and works to specification. Painters who left paint on the floor and considered the job done. Carpenters who disappeared mid-work and came back three days later without explanation. Plumbers who understood the problem and then created two more.
In the cities I had lived in, workers cleaned up after themselves without anyone asking them to. Here that is not part of the understanding. The cleaning is ours.
The water supply is a shared tap. Five houses on this stretch, one source, an arrangement that has been running since before I arrived.
My mother-in-law fills large containers and buckets every morning and evening. This is not an inconvenience to her. It is the rhythm of the house; she has done it for decades and sees no reason to change. We eventually arranged our plumbing. A small independence within the larger arrangement.
There is no geyser. The calcium content of the water here leaves visible deposits in a bucket within days. A geyser fills with scale and fails within months. So we use immersion rods—the metal heating element you lower into a bucket of cold water, which I had last seen in my grandmother’s house and which I had assumed belonged to a world that no longer existed.
I use one every morning in winter. It takes a few minutes. It has become unremarkable.
There is no air conditioning. The walls are original 1945 construction—thick, yes, but fragile in the specific way of structures that have been standing on their own integrity for eighty years. A split AC requires drilling holes through the wall. Drilling here means the wall comes with it. So there are no holes. In the summers, there are fans and coolers.
I want to be honest about all of this before I say anything else.
Because the story I could tell about this house—and the story I hear reflected back when people visit, when they see the photographs, when they say the word “Dehradun” with a particular quality of longing—is a story about trees and birds and the city disappearing the moment you step inside the gate.
That story is true. It is also incomplete without this part.
What Intentional Living in Dehradun Actually Gives You
The property sits in the heart of the city.
Adjacent to Racecourse, one of Dehradun’s more well-appointed localities, it is surrounded by new construction and the noise of a city finding its ambitions.
The moment you step inside the boundary, none of that exists.
The trees were planted by my wife’s grandfather and great-grandfather. Leechi, amla, mango, bel, kachnar, jackfruit—a canopy that has been growing longer than most apartment buildings in this city. Grey hornbills move through the branches in the morning. Fantails, parrots, owls, koyals. Squirrels treat the verandah as their own. Occasionally a mongoose walks in through the gate as if it has somewhere specific to be.
The hills are fifteen kilometers away. On a clear morning you can see them from the terrace.
I did not know, before I arrived, that this combination was possible—a fully functioning city within ten minutes in every direction and something entirely different inside these walls. I mean it literally when I call it the best of both worlds. Not as a selling point. As a description of what this address provides.
Here is what I found when I stopped treating the immersion rod as a problem.
I have always been drawn to old things. Not as an aesthetic position—as something more fundamental. To the patina of structures that have held generations. To the basic rather than the elaborate. To spaces that require adaptation rather than consumption.
This house required significant adaptation.
Some of it was restoration work. Some of it was learning to live within a logic entirely its own—different from anything a decade of metro life had prepared me for. A different relationship with water. A different relationship with tradespeople. A different relationship with what I could assume and what I had to arrange.
I found that process interesting rather than frustrating.
That, I have come to understand, was information itself.
The friction that would drive most people I know to the nearest flight back—the calcium deposits, the workers who leave the mess, and the fans and coolers in June—produced in me something closer to curiosity. Not because I am unusually patient or deliberately minimal. Because the comfort I actually need and the comfort I have been told I should want are not the same list.
I had spent years inside the assumption of the metro standard. Running water at any time. Reliable AC. Contractors who clean up as a matter of course. Not because I had examined this and chosen it. Because it was the available standard, and I had never stopped to ask whether it was also my preference.
When the available standard was removed, I found out.
It was not.
I did not find that out by thinking about it. I found it out by living somewhere that asked the question differently.
The move to Dehradun was my version of intentional living. It is not the definition of it.
I want to say that carefully, because the version of this story that travels easily is the one where I solved something that other people can solve by doing what I did. That is not what happened.
Someone else’s examined life might leave them exactly where they are. Same city, same apartment, a different relationship with what that life is actually for. The geography is not the method. The examination is.
I moved because my picture had mountains in it. And an old house that required something from me that a new one would not. And a canopy of trees I did not plant and have no claim to, which will be here long after I am gone.
That is what my specific examination produced.
Yours will produce something different.
What matters is not where you land. It is whether you looked at both sides of the page before you decided.
The house is not comfortable by conventional standards.
Most people I know would arrive here and find reasons to leave within a week. Not because they are weak — because the adjustment is genuinely significant and the discomfort is real.
I found it clarifying.
Those two things are not in contradiction. They are the whole story.
If any of this surfaced something—the Clarity Call is free and takes thirty minutes.