Our family holiday in Nahan happened because my husband Siddharth lost an argument.
Not a big argument. A small one, the kind that happens in our kitchen on Tuesday evenings when both of us are tired and the children are loud and someone has to decide something before the window closes.
We had been going back and forth on Goa for three weeks. I wanted Goa. Aanya, who is nine and has opinions about everything including things she has never experienced, wanted Goa. Kabir, who is six, wanted wherever Aanya wanted because that is his entire personality.
Siddharth wanted something else. He did not know what yet. He just kept saying Goa feels wrong this time and I kept saying Goa feels fine and we went around like that until one evening he came home, sat down next to me on the sofa, and showed me his phone.
A property called The Sirmour Retreat. Nahan. Himachal Pradesh.
I had never heard of Nahan.
I looked at the photographs for a while. Then I looked at him.
“Okay,” I said. “Fine.”
He has not stopped talking about winning that argument since.
We Cancelled Goa Fourteen Days Before We Were Supposed to Leave
Aanya did not speak to Siddharth for most of the next morning.
She is nine. She had already told her class. She had a list of things she was going to buy at the beach market. She had opinions about which sunscreen we should pack. This is who we are dealing with.
By afternoon she had moved into the negotiation phase.
“How many days in Nahan?”
Four, we told her.
“Do they have a pool?”
We said yes actually. And a play area too.
She considered this for approximately one second and then said fine in the tone of someone who had already decided she was coming anyway and just needed one win before agreeing.
Kabir, for the record, had already moved on entirely and was asking whether mountains were the same as hills or different.
The Drive Up Was the First Surprise
We left at five in the morning which means we actually left at five forty because that is how long it takes to get two children and their various requirements into a car.
A family holiday in Nahan from Delhi is about 290 kilometres by road. Five to six hours. We had done longer for worse destinations and we have done shorter for better ones. The road past Ambala is where it starts changing. Not dramatically. Gradually. The way your mood changes when someone puts on a song you had forgotten you loved.
Aanya fell asleep before Panipat and woke up somewhere in the foothills with her face against the window and an expression I had never seen on her before.
She did not say anything for almost ten minutes.
I want you to understand how significant that is.
Then she said: “Are we actually inside the mountains right now?”
Siddharth said yes.
She pressed her face harder against the glass.
Arriving Was Its Own Thing
The Sirmour Retreat sits above Nahan town and the last stretch of road up to the property is where the view arrives without warning.
We parked. Got out of the car. And the four of us just stood there.
The Shivalik hills on every side. The valley below, completely still. Air that felt like it had been kept somewhere cool and clean specifically for this moment.
Kabir took three steps toward the terrace edge, stopped completely, and turned around with the particular expression children get when something is too big for them to process and they need to check that the adults are also seeing it.
We were seeing it.
Aanya did not say anything loud or dramatic. She just found my hand and held it.
She has not done that without prompting since she was maybe seven.
That was the moment I understood why Siddharth had lost the argument on purpose.
What a Family Holiday in Nahan Does That a Beach Holiday Cannot
I do not want to be unfair to beaches. Beaches are lovely. This is not about beaches.
This is about the specific thing that happens to children when you take them somewhere that has a pool and space to run and absolutely no schedule telling them what to do between three and five.
The Sirmour Retreat has both. A pool that Kabir discovered within fifteen minutes of arriving and refused to leave for the next hour. A play area that Aanya declared acceptable after a brief inspection, which from her is high praise.
But here is what surprised us.
By the second morning neither of them was asking about the pool.
Aanya had collected forty seven stones from the garden and was arranging them by a system she had invented and refused to explain to anyone. Kabir had been following the same butterfly for twenty minutes with a focus and patience he has never once applied to anything I have asked of him.
Siddharth started filming it on his phone and then stopped because filming it felt like interrupting something.
We did not plan any of this. The hills just created the conditions and the children filled them.
A family holiday in Nahan at The Sirmour Retreat gave our children something most family holidays accidentally prevent while trying to provide it. Unstructured time in a place beautiful enough to make them stop reaching for something better.
“We came for the views and the break. What a family holiday in Nahan actually gave us was four days of our children being themselves, without schedule, without anywhere else they needed to be. The Sirmour Retreat gave us that. The hills held it in place.”
Meghna, guest at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
The Pool That Stopped Being the Point
I want to come back to the pool for a moment because this is important for any parent reading this.
Kabir spent the first afternoon in it. He came out only because I made him. He talked about it through dinner. He asked if he could go back after dinner. The answer was no. He was not pleased.
The next morning he woke up, looked out of the window at the garden and the hills, and said: “Can we go outside instead?”
The pool was there the entire trip. He used it twice.
The hills won.
That is not something I could have predicted or planned for. It just happened because the place created conditions where something more interesting than a pool was always available and always visible and always asking nothing in return.
The play area got slightly more consistent attention from both of them. But even that gave way by day three to the garden, the terrace, the stones, the butterfly, and the specific joy of being somewhere with no next thing scheduled.
The Meals Are a Separate Story Entirely
Kabir does not eat things that are touching each other.
This is a firm rule he established at age four and has not revised. Dal cannot touch rice. Rice cannot touch sabzi. Sabzi cannot touch anything. The plate must have clear borders at all times.
On the second evening at The Sirmour Retreat he ate a mixed Himachali dish where everything was touching everything else and asked for more.
I did not say a word. I looked at Siddharth. Siddharth looked at me. We said nothing because saying something would jinx it.
The food at The Sirmour Retreat does something. It is Himachali cuisine made with an honesty that does not try to impress you before it feeds you. The dal is made the way dal should taste and mostly does not in restaurants that are also managing seventeen other things.
Dinner on the third night lasted almost two hours. Not because service was slow. Because nobody wanted to leave the table, which is a sentence I have never said before about a meal with two children under ten.
Aanya asked Siddharth questions about his childhood. Real questions. Where did you play. What did you eat. Did your parents ever let you stay out after dark.
He answered all of them. At the table, in the hills, at the end of the day. He had the time to.
The Thing Siddharth Said That I Keep Thinking About
Third morning. Both children still asleep. We were on the terrace with chai and the Shivaliks were doing something extraordinary with the early light, the kind of thing you can see but cannot describe usefully.
Siddharth said: “I feel like I am actually on holiday.”
I asked him what he meant since we were technically on holiday.
He said: “Not away from work. Actually on holiday. Present. Here.”
There is a difference. Most trips out of the city are just work happening somewhere with a nicer view. The laptop comes, the phone comes, the mental checklist comes. You are physically elsewhere and mentally exactly where you always are.
Nahan did not allow that.
Something about the altitude, the open space, the absence of anything performing for your attention, simply did not permit the usual noise to follow us.
Siddharth did not check his phone before ten for four consecutive days.
I mention this because I was not sure that was something he was still capable of doing.
What the Kids Took Home From This Family Holiday in Nahan
Aanya’s forty seven stones came home in her backpack.
Kabir’s one specific stone came home in his pocket. He had found it on the garden path, declared it perfect, and refused to leave it. It is currently on his desk next to his pencil box and he has named it something he will not tell us.
But more than the stones, they came back different in the specific way children come back from trips that have actually worked. A little slower. A little more willing to sit somewhere without demanding entertainment from it.
The Monday after we came back Aanya sat on the balcony of our Gurugram apartment for fifteen minutes before dinner. Just sat there.
I asked her what she was doing.
She said she was looking at the sky.
She said Nahan had taught her that the sky is worth looking at.
I did not know what to do with that so I just said yes and went back inside.
The Practical Things Worth Knowing
Nahan is 290 kilometres from Delhi, roughly 100 kilometres from Chandigarh. The road is good. Leave before six from Delhi and you avoid the worst of the highway traffic and arrive in the hills while everything is still soft and the day has not yet fully committed to itself.
April was perfect for us. Warm enough for the children to be outside all day, in the pool mid afternoon, and on the play area until the light started going. Cool enough at night that everyone slept properly which is not something our children usually do in new places.
The Sirmour Retreat works well for families with young children. The pool and play area meant we never had to manage the children into activity. They found their own way into it. Kabir is six and never once felt like an inconvenience in a space that genuinely accommodates rather than merely tolerates small people.
Take layers for the evenings. The temperature drops after sunset and the terrace at that hour is exactly where you want to be.
A family holiday in Nahan does not need much planning to work. The hills, the pool, the play area, the food, and the team at The Sirmour Retreat do most of the work once you arrive.
We Are Going Back in October
Siddharth booked it on the drive home. Not when we got back to Delhi. On the drive. Somewhere near Ambala with the hills still visible in the rear view mirror.
Five nights this time. October after the monsoon when the Shivaliks are washed clean and the visibility is extraordinary and the air has that particular quality that makes everything feel more worth paying attention to.
Aanya knows. She has already started a list of which stones she wants to look for.
Kabir has already asked whether his stone from last time will recognise him when he goes back.
We told him probably yes.
He seemed satisfied with that.
The Honest Version of Why This Was the Best Trip We Have Taken
We have done resort holidays. We have done city trips. We have done the kind of holiday where everyone poses in front of something famous and calls it a memory.
This was different because it gave us something those trips cannot manufacture.
Four days of being together without a reason to be anywhere else. Four days of Siddharth telling stories and Aanya asking questions and Kabir following butterflies and me sitting on a terrace watching the light change and not feeling like I should be doing something more useful.
The pool was there. The play area was there. The team at The Sirmour Retreat made sure everything was there.
But the thing that made this the best family holiday in Nahan we have ever taken was not any of those things specifically.
It was the four of us, together, in a place that did not ask anything from us and gave everything in return.
The city took a lot from us across the months before this trip. Not dramatically. Gradually. The way things get taken when you are too busy to notice.
Nahan gave it back.
That is why it was the best trip we have ever taken.
And we are not finished taking it.
