We did not know what we had found when we stumbled upon Grandma Stokes back in the middle of 2021. Our group was still twenty people or more, and a homestay of only six rooms, no matter how beautiful it was, inside and outside, was of no use. That is what was going through my mind as my cab driver and I drove away from Grandma Stokes that evening, slowly going downhill, watching the homes light up in the distance like stars scattered across the night sky.
We ended up staying in a basic accommodation down by the Sutlej, which was ten degrees warmer than where Grandma Stokes sat and a hundred and eighty degrees opposite in experience to what a good homestay can actually give you. Of course, I did not fully understand that, then as much as I do now.
I had set off from Chandigarh toward Kaza in Spiti, but Kinnaur was the place I had heard of first. Way back in the mid-eighties, my father used to take me with him to Shimla, to a hotel we had a partnership in. Long before the road that went up the hill toward that hotel, there was another road that split off to the left, with a kilometre sign that read Narkanda.
I would ask him in Marathi, “Daddy, ha rasta kuthe jaato?” Where does this road go?
“To Kinnaur,” he would say.
That Kinnaur, I think, must have been calling me all along. It made me take a road I had only ever seen the beginning of. And Thanedhar sat right on its edge, in Upper Shimla, just before you entered Kinnaur. Thanedhar would soon become the reason we returned to Himachal, a Himachal I had known through my father’s eyes, through Shimla, Manali, and Kullu, now replaced in my memory by Kinnaur, Lahaul, and Spiti.
This is how I began to understand what we, as a company, were really looking for. We had found our calling. Grandma Stokes and Thanedhar were the reason we found it. And here I am again, five years later, coming back to Thanedhar.
A lot has happened since that day in 2021. On our way back from Spiti that time, I did not make the same mistake again. I stayed at Grandma Stokes. And I did not just see the lights glowing on the mountains from the road, I saw them from the terrace.
Coming back to Thanedhar now, in the early summer of 2026, and staying at Saroga Woods with Anuradha, or visiting Meenakshi Aunty at the Seetalvan Orchard, feels like nothing more than an extension of that evening in 2021.
An extension, perhaps, of understanding how every homestay is different and yet they all share one thing, stories. Stories that are not commercially driven, but fuelled by a life choice. For some owners it is choosing quiet over the city. For others it is simply continuing to live in the home they were born in and meeting people from around the world. I just happen to be one of those people they meet, and when the conversation clicks, the work is only an offshoot of that.
Today, Raahghar, the homestay community we are trying to build, has three homes around Thanedhar. A village where five nationalised banks have their branches serving a population of just over two thousand people.
The cluster of Kotgarh, Thanedhar, and the surrounding areas is perhaps the most sampanna, prosperous, in all of Himachal Pradesh.
This is also where the first apple sapling was planted by Satyanand Stokes. I don’t think he knew, back in 1912, that this would eventually give birth to one of the most famous apple varieties in the country, the Kinnaur apple. The apple trees have begun to blossom. Soon it will be cherry-plucking season, and then the pears will follow.
Thanedhar will bloom all the way through till autumn. Here, the leaves simply fall, they do not turn yellow first, or perhaps I just have never been here at the right time to see that.
Much like now, it still feels like I am hearing about this place for the first time, the way my father once pointed toward Kinnaur from a road I had never yet taken.
