Planning our anniversary trip in Himachal started as an argument.
Not a serious one. The kind of argument that married couples have when they are both tired and both have opinions and neither of them has slept properly in two weeks.
My wife Riya wanted Goa. Again. We had done Goa for our fifth anniversary and our sixth and she had a specific resort she liked and a specific beach she liked and a specific cocktail at a specific beach shack that she had already mentally ordered.
I wanted something different. I did not know what. Just different.
She said: “Different how.”
I said: “Different in a way that we remember it the way you remember something rather than the way you remember that it was nice.”
She looked at me for a moment.
Then she said: “That sentence does not make sense.”
She was right. It did not make sense as a sentence. But she understood what I meant anyway, which is one of the things that happens after eight years that I did not expect and have not stopped being grateful for.
We did not book Goa.
How the Anniversary Trip in Himachal Happened
My colleague at work, a woman named Priyanka who takes four trips a year and discusses all of them in detail whether you have asked or not, had been to Nahan in October.
She had stayed at a property called The Sirmour Retreat.
She talked about it the way she does not usually talk about trips. Less detail. Longer pauses. The specific quality of someone trying to describe something that keeps escaping the description.
She said: “The hills do something to you there. I cannot tell you what exactly. But Rahul, if you are looking for an anniversary that feels like an anniversary, go to Nahan.”
I wrote it down on a Post-it.
Riya found the Post-it on the kitchen counter three days later.
She looked it up before I got home from work.
When I walked in she was sitting at the dining table with her laptop open and she looked up and said: “We are going to Nahan.”
Not a question.
I said: “I was going to suggest that.”
She said: “I know. I am saying it first.”
That is also one of the things that happens after eight years.
What We Found When We Looked at The Sirmour Retreat
The photographs stopped both of us the same way.
Not the kind of photographs that a professional photographer spends three days staging. The kind that look like someone pointed a camera at something real and the real thing was extraordinary enough to not need staging.
The Sirmour Retreat sits above the town of Nahan in the Shivalik hills of Sirmour district, Himachal Pradesh. The terrace looks over a valley that stretches further than any single photograph can contain. The hills on every side. The town below, small and unhurried and entirely itself. The sky doing whatever the sky does in Himachal at that altitude, which is considerably more than it does in Mumbai.
We had done Goa twice for anniversaries.
This was going to be different.
Riya called The Sirmour Retreat directly because she does not trust booking platforms for decisions this size. She told them it was our eighth anniversary. She told them we were coming from Mumbai. She asked them one question that I think is the right question to ask any property before you stay there for a significant occasion.
“What does the place do to people?”
The answer she received satisfied her completely. She did not tell me what it was. She said I would find out when we got there.
Eight years in and she still manages to surprise me.
The Journey to Our Anniversary Trip in Himachal
We flew into Chandigarh.
This was Priyanka’s specific advice. Do not try to do Nahan from Delhi by road if you are coming from Mumbai. Fly to Chandigarh, stay the night, drive to Nahan in the morning when the road is quiet and the hills are doing their early morning thing.
She was right about this too. Priyanka is usually right about travel logistics and I have learned to simply accept this.
We drove from Chandigarh to Nahan on a Saturday morning in a taxi that Riya had arranged, leaving the city at seven before the traffic had fully committed to being traffic.
The road from Chandigarh to Nahan takes you through Pinjore and then climbs in the specific way that Himachal roads climb: not dramatically, not in sudden switchbacks, but gradually and persistently until you look up and realise the plains have disappeared and you are inside something entirely different.
Riya was reading. She is always reading on drives. She put the book down somewhere past Pinjore and did not pick it back up.
She looked out of the window for the rest of the drive.
I watched her looking out of the window more than I watched the road.
This was fine because I was not driving.
Arriving at The Sirmour Retreat
The Sirmour Retreat came into view on a curve in the road that the driver took slowly as though he had done this many times and understood what the reveal required.
The Shivalik range opened in every direction. The valley below still. The property sitting in the hillside the way things sit when they belong there rather than having been placed there by someone who thought it would look good.
We stepped out of the taxi.
Riya put her hand on my arm.
She does this when something exceeds what she was prepared for. She had done it at our wedding when she saw the venue fully decorated for the first time. She had done it on the evening our daughter was born. She does not do it often.
She did it here.
The team from The Sirmour Retreat came out to welcome us before either of us had fully processed where we were. Someone said our names. Not read them off a screen but said them, looking at us, the way you say the names of people you have been expecting and are glad to see.
Our room looked directly over the valley.
I am going to say that again because it matters. Directly. Over. The valley.
Not a view you access by pressing your face against a particular corner of a small window. The whole thing, from anywhere in the room, available at every hour.
Riya sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it.
Then she looked at me.
Then back at the view.
Then she said: “This is what she meant.”
I asked what Priyanka had said on the phone.
She said: “She said the place makes you feel held. I thought that was a strange word for a hotel. I understand it now.”
What an Anniversary Trip in Himachal Gives You That Eight Years in Cities Does Not
We have lived in Mumbai for the entire eight years of our marriage.
Mumbai is a city that gives you many things. It gives you pace and possibility and the specific energy of a place that does not stop. It gives you great food and great crowds and great traffic and the feeling that something is always happening somewhere near you.
It does not give you stillness.
By the second hour of the first afternoon at The Sirmour Retreat, sitting on the terrace with the Shivaliks simply being what they are and the valley below completely still and nothing anywhere near us competing for attention, I understood what eight years of Mumbai had been costing us in a way that I had not noticed while we were inside it.
Riya noticed it differently.
She said: “I cannot remember the last time I sat somewhere and felt like the sitting was the thing rather than the waiting for the next thing.”
She does not make statements like that easily. She is not someone who articulates internal states in complete sentences. The hills were doing something to her vocabulary.
An anniversary trip in Himachal does this. Not because the hills are magical in any mystical sense. Because they are large enough and quiet enough and indifferent enough to everything you have been carrying that the carrying simply stops being possible. You put it down. Not deliberately. Because the hills do not have a surface for it to rest on.
The Evening That Made the Anniversary Real
We had dinner on the terrace.
The team at The Sirmour Retreat had arranged a small setup without us asking for it. A table for two. Candles. The valley going dark below us in the specific sequence that Nahan evenings follow: gold first, then amber, then the particular shade that exists for eight minutes before the dark arrives, then the lights of Nahan town appearing below one by one as though someone is placing them carefully.
The food was Himachali cuisine made with a patience and honesty that announced itself in the first dish.
The Madra. A chickpea preparation in yoghurt with spices I still cannot fully identify and have stopped trying to because recreating them in a Mumbai kitchen feels like missing the point.
Riya took one bite and put her fork down.
I waited.
She said: “Why is this so good.”
Not a question she expected an answer to. An expression of genuine confusion at the gap between what she had expected hill station food to be and what was actually in front of her.
The Siddu came after. A steamed Himachali bread that sounds like nothing in a description and arrives on the plate as something that recalibrates your entire understanding of the category.
Dinner lasted almost two hours. We had not had a dinner last two hours since before our daughter was born. Nobody hurried us. The valley was doing its thing below. The candles were doing their thing between us.
At some point Riya said: “This is the anniversary I wanted and did not know how to ask for.”
I thought about that sentence for a long time afterward.
What the Second Morning Added
I woke at six fifteen on Sunday.
This is not something I do in Mumbai. In Mumbai I wake when the alarm tells me to and negotiate with it about whether the first alarm was serious or advisory.
I went to the terrace because the terrace was there and because anything else felt like the wrong response to the morning.
The valley was in mist. The hills above were in the first light. That specific quality of early morning in the Shivaliks where the day has not yet decided what it is going to be and everything exists in a provisional, beautiful state.
Chai arrived without me asking.
Someone from The Sirmour Retreat had seen me on the terrace and made a quiet decision about what the moment needed. No announcement. No asking if I wanted anything. Chai, on the table beside me, and then they were gone.
I sat there with the chai and the mist and the hills for almost an hour.
Riya came out at seven.
She sat next to me without saying good morning. Just sat there the way you sit next to someone after eight years when the silence between you is as comfortable as anything you could say.
At some point she said: “Thank you for not booking Goa.”
I said: “Thank you for finding the Post-it.”
She laughed. The specific laugh that means she is completely happy rather than happy about something.
That laugh is the best sound I know.
Our Anniversary Trip in Himachal Compared to Everything Before It
Goa was lovely. Both times.
I want to say that clearly because this is not a story about Goa being wrong. It is a story about finding something more right.
An anniversary trip in Himachal at The Sirmour Retreat gave us two days in which the occasion actually happened rather than being executed. We did not perform our anniversary. We had it. There is a difference between those two things that I could not have articulated before this trip and that I can now describe very simply.
In Goa we were two people in a beautiful place celebrating a number.
In Nahan we were two people in a place that made us feel like the two people we actually are, without the city noise around us constantly reminding us of all the roles we also play.
That distinction is the whole thing.
“An anniversary trip in Himachal at The Sirmour Retreat showed us what we had been missing in eight years of city celebrations. Not the food, not the view, not even the quiet, though all of those were extraordinary. What we had been missing was two days where we were simply each other’s company without anything else competing for the position. Nahan gave us that. The hills held everything else outside.”
Riya, guest at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
What to Know Before You Plan This
Nahan is about 100 kilometres from Chandigarh and approximately 290 kilometres from Delhi. Flying into Chandigarh and driving to Nahan the next morning is the approach we would recommend for anyone coming from a distance. The drive from Chandigarh takes under two hours and the road is well maintained and considerably quieter than the Shimla highway.
The Sirmour Retreat is intimate by design. Tell the team it is an anniversary when you book. They will pay attention to the small things in a way that changes the atmosphere of the stay without making a production of it.
The best months for an anniversary trip in Himachal at this property are March through June and September through November. October gives you post monsoon clarity in the Shivaliks that makes the view from the terrace extraordinary at every hour of the day. April gives you spring light and temperature that makes the outdoor spaces completely comfortable from morning until well after dinner.
Book two nights minimum. The first evening settles you into the place. The second morning is where the actual anniversary happens, in the quiet on the terrace with chai that arrives without being asked for and the valley assembling itself below you and nowhere else you need to be.
Pack light. The hills do not require much. The Sirmour Retreat provides everything that matters.
Why We Will Not Be Going Back to Goa
Riya booked the next trip before we reached Chandigarh airport on the return journey.
Not the same dates. Not the same number of nights. Three nights this time because she had decided that two was enough to love the place and three would be enough to fully live inside it.
I did not argue.
After eight years I know which decisions to argue about and which ones to simply agree with and feel grateful for.
The ninth anniversary is already decided.
Nahan. The Sirmour Retreat. Three nights.
The Shivaliks in whatever mood October gives them.
Chai on the terrace before the valley has assembled itself.
And the specific laugh that means she is completely happy.
That is what an anniversary trip in Himachal gives you when the place is right.
Everything else is just a number on a calendar.
