What I did not know, joining those Sunday morning treks, is that I would find in Dehradun the most honest answer I have seen to a question I think about often: What does life after loss in India actually look like when someone refuses to let it be the end of the story?
Every Sunday morning at 5am, a group of people assembles at the base of a trail in Dehradun.
No fees. No registration. No agenda beyond the hill and the hour. They call themselves the 5am Club.
I joined in 2025 when I was new to the city and knew almost nobody. I have always loved the mountains. The trek was free. And I thought, what is the worst that could happen at five in the morning on a hillside?
I met Amrendra on the first Sunday.
He fell into step beside me somewhere on the trail and struck up a conversation. He mentioned his name. I turned to look at him and said, without quite meaning to, “Amrendra Bahubali?”
He laughed. A genuine, full laugh. The kind that comes from someone who is not performing anything.
We talked the entire trek. The hills, the city, where we had each come from, what we were building. By the time we descended, I knew two things: this man was someone worth knowing, and he had been in Dehradun long enough to know it in a way I was still learning.
I kept meeting him on the Sunday treks. The trail was better for his company. After a few weeks the treks had become something I looked forward to not just for the hills but for the conversation.
Then, he invited my family for dinner.
I was reluctant. I did not want to impose on someone’s home. Amrendra insisted in the way that certain people insist—not pushily, but with the quiet certainty of someone who means it and will not be easily dissuaded.
We went.
I did not know, at that point, what he had built. I did not know the name White Lotus—Kanu’s Abode or its history or what it represented. I walked into the property as a dinner guest, knowing only that my new friend from the Sunday treks had invited us over.
What happened next is difficult to describe with precision, because it was not a single moment but an accumulation of them.
The air was different inside the property. Not cooler or warmer—different in quality, as if it moved at a slightly different pace from the air outside. The property itself—the grounds, the structures, the spaces between things—had an unhurriedness built into it. Not by design, in the interior-decorator sense, but by intention. Someone had made deliberate choices here about what to include and what to leave out, about where to allow space and where to fill it.
Within ten minutes of walking in, my body had slowed down.
I did not notice it happening. I noticed it had happened.
That is the specific quality of White Lotus-Kanu’s Abode that I have never been able to fully explain to people who have not been there. It is not beautiful in a curated, photographed way. It is alive in a way that makes you quieter. Something in the arrangement of the place asks you to be present in it rather than to move through it.
I sat in the garden after dinner and thought, This is where the retreats should happen.
Not as a business calculation. As an instinct. The thought arrived before I had finished processing it.
I learned the story of White Lotus gradually, over several evenings and many treks.
Amrendra’s wife was Kanu.
She was into alternate therapy and healing—the specific, patient kind of work with the body and the spirit that requires presence and gentleness and knowledge that cannot be entirely learned from books. She was excellent at it. She had built something of her own within the world of healing and in the relationship they had together.
The second wave of Covid arrived in 2021 with particular cruelty. It moved fast and hit hard. During that specific season of overwhelmed hospitals, depleted oxygen supplies, and the horror of watching loved ones struggle for breath, Amrendra watched Kanu die.
He had the resources. He had the connections. He had everything that a person is told will protect them from the worst outcomes. None of it was enough.
Life After Loss in India: Two Ways to Go
Life after loss in India — the real version, not the managed version — almost always goes one of two ways. Contraction or expansion. Most people contract.
I want to stay with that for a moment before moving forward, because what Amrendra did next is only fully comprehensible in the context of what he had lost.
When grief this large arrives, most people contract. The world becomes smaller. The remaining life shrinks around the absence—not because the person chooses to shrink but because the shape of everything changes when the person at the center of it is gone.
What Amrendra did was the opposite.
He expanded.
He took the property. It had been their shared space, their shared vision of what a home in Dehradun should feel like. And he built something in Kanu’s memory. He named the entire property White Lotus-Kanu’s Abode. He named every room after a different name for the lotus—the flower that has grown for thousands of years in India as the symbol of beauty that emerges from muddy water. Purity that grows from the most unlikely conditions.
The choice of that specific metaphor is not accidental.
Every room at White Lotus carries a name that means lotus. When you sleep in one of those rooms, you are sleeping inside a name that Kanu chose by existing. The rooms named for the flower he chose to associate with the life they built together and the life he chose to continue building after she was gone.
This is what I mean when I say the property carries intention in its walls. It is not a design philosophy or a branding decision. It is grief turned into something beautiful, deliberately, over time.
The Decision That Made White Lotus-Kanu’s Abode What It Is
The Taj Group came calling at some point.
The offer was what you would expect from a major hotel group—substantial, formal, the kind of offer that most people with a property of this quality would consider seriously. Take the property upmarket. Put it on the map. Let the brand do the work.
Amrendra declined.
Not because the money was not right. Because the question the Taj Group was asking—what can this property become commercially—was not the question White Lotus had been built to answer.
The question White Lotus was built to answer is a different one. What does it feel like to live deliberately, after the hardest thing, in a place you built with your own hands and named for the flower that blooms in mud?
Some things are not for scale. Amrendra understood this. He chose to keep the property exactly what it was: intimate, unhurried, tended by him and the people he trusts, available to the people who find their way there through some combination of luck and the right questions.
What 65 Looks Like When the Life Is Designed
He is 65 years old.
This was, when I learned it, genuinely surprising. He had looked to me like a man in his late forties—not in the way of people who have worked very hard at looking younger, but in the way of people for whom age has simply not been the story they are living. He is fit in a way that comes from consistent, genuine physical engagement with the world. He moves like someone who has not accepted the premise that movement becomes pricier with time.
What life after loss looks like in India, for most people, is a careful narrowing. What it looked like for Amrendra was the opposite.
He treks every Sunday at 5am. He has done this for years. He will do it next Sunday and the Sunday after that. Not as a performance of vitality but as the specific, ordinary practice of someone who has decided that this is how he lives.
Life after loss in India often looks like withdrawal. Like the careful management of what remains. Like the gradual narrowing of the frame to protect what is still there.
Amrendra is the opposite. He is the proof that loss, met with enough deliberateness and enough love for the life that remains, can produce the opposite of withdrawal. It can produce the kind of aliveness that makes people look at you and say—half-joking, half-genuinely curious—”What exactly are you doing?”
What he is doing is living. Specifically. In the place he built. In the way he chose. At the pace he set. He is the most alive person I have met in Dehradun.
He is, I have come to understand, a living retreat himself.
Why Viram Happens at White Lotus and Not Somewhere Else
I went to Amrendra a few weeks after that first dinner.
I told him about Viram—the four-day leadership retreat I had been planning since moving to Dehradun, built around the painting exercise and the pause philosophy that had changed my own life in 2013. I told him about the kind of people I was hoping to bring—senior professionals at a crossroads, founders running from something they hadn’t yet named, and people who needed four days to ask a question they had been moving too fast to hear.
I told him I wanted to run the retreat at White Lotus-Kanu’s Abode.
He happily said yes.
The first two cohorts—family and friends, pilot versions to test the shape of the program—happened at White Lotus. Everyone had an experience that went beyond what the program produced. They had experienced Amrendra. His ease. His warmth. His specific way of being present in his own home that asks you, without words, to be present too.
The retreats did not work because of the program. The program worked because the property gave it the conditions it needed.
You cannot manufacture what Amrendra has built. You can only bring people to where it already exists.
Kedarnath on Diwali: The Friendship Beyond the Property
On Diwali that year, Amrendra called.
He was going to Kedarnath. He asked if I would come.
I was hesitant. Diwali is a family occasion. The timing felt strange. But I did not decline immediately—and Amrendra has a way of making the things you are hesitant about sound like exactly what is needed.
I researched and found that the Kedarnath closing ceremony happens on Padwa, which meant the main Diwali day was available for family before the trek. The next morning we left.
Five days. The Himalayas. Kedarnath in the specific quiet of the closing—after the summer pilgrims have gone and before the winter seals it shut. It is one of the most powerful places I have been in India, and being there with Amrendra—someone who moves through sacred spaces with the ease of someone who has found his own version of the sacred in an ordinary Sunday morning at 5am—was an experience of a different order.
We have also done Mini Gartang Gali together—a trail near Rishikesh that I would not have found on my own and that was made extraordinary by his company. He knows the mountains the way people know things that have mattered to them for a long time—not through maps but through relationships.
We are great friends now.
I am not sure exactly when that happened. There was no moment of declaration. There was just the gradual accumulation of treks and dinners and calls that asked nothing and gave everything. The specific quality of a friendship where neither person is performing anything for the other.
He calls when he feels like it. I call when I feel like it. We meet on the trail on Sundays when the morning allows it. We plan the occasional adventure. We check in.
No agenda. No transaction. No expectation beyond the conversation.
I think about what Amrendra represents in the context of Viram often.
Viram is built around one question: what kind of life do you actually want to be living? Not the life you are performing. Not the life that looks right from the outside. The specific, textured, chosen life.
Amrendra has been answering that question with his actual choices for longer than I have been asking it. He lost the person he loved most and chose beauty over bitterness. He had the resources to do anything and chose this—a property in the hills named after a flower, tended with his own hands, open to the people who find their way to it. He was offered scale and chose depth.
He is 65 and looks a couple of decades younger. Not because he has worked at appearing young but because something about the life he is living has not agreed to age at the expected rate.
Life after loss in India—real life, not managed grief—looks like Amrendra. It looks like someone who took the hardest thing and refused to let it be the end of the story. Who built something in the shape of what he had lost, named it after a flower that blooms in the most unlikely conditions, and kept going.
The lotus blooms in muddy water. That is not a consolation. It is a fact about what is possible when the conditions are right.
White Lotus-Kanu’s Abode was built in the muddiest water. And it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.
If you are coming to Viram, you will stay in a room named after the lotus.
You will wake up in a space that was built by someone who understands loss and chose beauty anyway. You will walk grounds where the deliberate life is not a philosophy or a program but the actual decision that produced every stone and every plant and every quiet corner.
The retreat does not produce the conditions for honest self-examination.
Amrendra already built those conditions. The retreat just brings you to where they exist.
Come when you are ready. The property will do the rest.