Finding a family resort in Nahan was my mother’s idea.
Not mine. Not my brother Varun’s. Not the group chat that had been running for six weeks trying to agree on where fourteen people across three very different life stages were supposed to spend four days together without someone ending up frustrated.
My mother said it quietly over the phone one evening, the way she says things she has already decided.
“There is a place in Nahan. I have been reading about it. I think it is exactly what this family needs right now.”
She had no idea how right she was going to turn out to be.
Why This Particular Family Trip Was Overdue
Let me give you some context.
My parents are in their late sixties. Varun and his wife Deepika have two children under ten. I had just come out of a stretch of work that had made me someone I did not entirely recognise. And our grandmother, who we call Nani, had not travelled anywhere since 2019.
Fourteen people. Four generations. Completely different ideas of what a good holiday looks like.
We had tried to plan something together twice before. Both times it fell apart in the group chat before anyone had even booked anything. Too hot for the kids, too cold for Nani, too crowded for Varun, too quiet for the children, too expensive for one branch of the family and not good enough for another.
The second time it collapsed, my mother went quiet for a week. Then she called me.
“We are going to Nahan,” she said. “I have already looked at the property. Everyone is coming.”
That was the end of the discussion.
What My Mother Had Found
She had been reading about The Sirmour Retreat, a family resort in Nahan tucked into the Shivalik hills of Sirmour district in Himachal Pradesh.
She sent me photographs without much explanation. The Shivalik range on every side. A terrace looking over a valley that seemed designed specifically for the kind of conversations families put off indefinitely. Spaces that felt genuinely accommodating rather than merely large.
I scrolled through them and felt something I had not expected.
Relief.
Not excitement exactly. Something quieter than that. The specific relief of seeing a place and immediately knowing it can hold what you are bringing to it.
I called Varun. He looked up the property while we were still on the phone.
He said: “This actually might work.”
Coming from Varun, who had vetoed every previous suggestion without exception, that was essentially a standing ovation.
The Morning We All Left for Nahan
We travelled in three cars.
My parents and Nani in the first, leaving earliest because Nani does not like highway driving after ten in the morning. Varun and Deepika with the children in the second. Me and my partner in the third.
We had arranged to meet at a dhaba near Ambala and continue together from there.
The drive from Delhi to Nahan covers roughly 290 kilometres. Five to six hours depending on traffic. The road climbs gradually past Ambala and by the time the Shivaliks start appearing on the horizon, the atmosphere in the car changes without anyone deciding it should.
My partner noticed it first.
“You look different,” she said somewhere in the foothills.
I had not noticed it happening. But she was right.
When we stopped at the dhaba, Varun’s older son was already running around the parking area chasing something only he could see. My father was standing outside his car with his hands in his pockets looking at the hills. Nani was finishing her chai with the particular patience she brings to good things.
Nobody was looking at a phone.
We had barely arrived anywhere yet.
What Happened When We Pulled Into The Sirmour Retreat
The family resort in Nahan sits above the town, reached by a road that curves through the hillside before opening onto the property.
The moment we parked and stepped out, Nani said something in Punjabi that roughly translates as: the air here is doing something to me.
She said it before she had even looked at the property. Just the air.
The Sirmour Retreat welcomed fourteen people with the kind of ease that communicates genuine preparation rather than last minute adjustment. Every room had been thought about. The children had space to move. Nani’s room was on the ground floor without anyone having had to request it. My parents had a view of the valley that my father stood in front of for a long time without saying anything.
By the time everyone had settled in and we gathered on the main terrace for the first time, something had already started shifting in the atmosphere between us.
The hills did not ask anything of us. They simply existed, wide and unhurried and completely indifferent to the various tensions and schedules and notifications we had all carried up the mountain with us.
Within two hours most of that had quietly put itself down.
What a Family Resort in Nahan Actually Does to a Family
I want to try to describe this carefully because it is the most important part of the story.
Families in cities develop a kind of companionable distance. You love each other completely but you exist in parallel rather than together. Different schedules, different screens, different rooms. You share a home or a group chat or a biannual dinner and call it closeness.
It is not closeness. It is adjacency.
The family resort in Nahan removed the adjacency and replaced it with something more honest.
There was nowhere to retreat to that was not also beautiful. The terrace pulled everyone toward it. Meals happened around a table where the view competed for attention with the conversation and both won. The children ran out of invented things to do and started actually playing, the kind of unstructured, unselfconscious play that only happens when screens are not available and adults are not supervising every moment.
On the second morning Varun’s younger son, who is six and usually attached to a tablet, spent forty five minutes sitting with Nani on the terrace asking her questions about things she remembered from before any of us existed.
Deepika filmed thirty seconds of it on her phone and then put the phone away because it felt wrong to watch through a screen.
The Meals That Became Their Own Event
Nobody warned us about the food.
The Sirmour Retreat serves Himachali cuisine with a confidence and lightness that turns every meal into something worth slowing down for. Not elaborate. Not trying to impress. Simply very good food made with genuine attention.
Dinner on the second evening lasted almost two hours. Not because anyone was hungry for two hours but because nobody wanted to leave the table.
My father told a story from 1987 that none of us had ever heard. Nani corrected two details and added one that changed the entire ending. Varun laughed in the way he used to laugh before work made him careful about it.
My mother looked around the table at some point near the end of the meal and her expression was the kind that does not need translating.
This. This is what she had been trying to give us.
“A family resort in Nahan does something that city holidays never quite manage. It removes the buffer between people. The Sirmour Retreat gave our family four days of genuine closeness that none of us had experienced in years and all of us had quietly been missing without knowing how to ask for it.”
Priya, guest at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
The Moment That Has Stayed With All of Us
It happened on the third evening.
We were all on the terrace after dinner, the valley below completely dark, the lights of Nahan town scattered like something deliberate in the distance. A warm wind coming off the hills. The children had fallen asleep inside.
Nobody was planning anything. Nobody was checking a phone. Nobody was managing the evening toward a particular outcome.
We were just there. Together. In the specific way that families rarely are.
Nani said, to nobody in particular: “I had forgotten what this feels like.”
Nobody asked what she meant. We all already knew.
What the Children Took From This Trip
Varun told me something on the drive back that I have thought about many times since.
He said his older son, who is eight, had asked him on the last morning whether they could live here instead.
Varun had laughed and said probably not.
His son thought about it for a moment and then said: “But we should come back. Nani looked happy here.”
An eight year old noticed something about his great grandmother that the rest of us had been too busy managing the logistics of the trip to say out loud.
The family resort in Nahan did that. It slowed everything down enough that an eight year old could see clearly what adults usually miss entirely.
What You Should Know Before You Plan This Trip
The Sirmour Retreat works as a family resort in Nahan for groups of varying sizes. Our fourteen people felt accommodated without feeling crowded. The property is intimate by design, which means every member of your family feels seen rather than processed.
Nahan is roughly 290 kilometres from Delhi and about 100 kilometres from Chandigarh. The drive is comfortable and the altitude is gentle, with no concerns for older travellers or very young children. The roads are well maintained throughout.
The best months for a family trip are March through June and September through November. October is particularly good for families with school going children since the post monsoon air makes the hills extraordinary and the weather requires no special preparation.
Leaving early from Delhi, before six in the morning, turns the drive into part of the experience rather than something to endure. We arrived before noon on the first day and had the entire afternoon to settle in before the hills worked their way into everyone.
We Are Already Planning the Next One
Before we had even reached Ambala on the drive home, the group chat that had spent six weeks failing to agree on a destination sent its first message.
Same place next year?
Fourteen thumbs up in under three minutes.
That has never happened in the history of our family group chat.
The family resort in Nahan did something in four days that years of city dinners and biannual gatherings had not managed. It gave us back each other. Not a performance of togetherness but the actual thing.
My mother called me that evening after we had both reached home.
She did not say much. She asked if I understood now why she had been so certain.
I told her I understood completely.
She said: “Good. Book it for October next year before Varun changes his mind.”
I already had.
The Only Thing We Got Wrong
We booked four days.
We should have booked six.
By the third morning everyone had found their rhythm. Nani had found her chair on the terrace that caught the morning sun at exactly the right angle. The children had found the particular patch of garden that suited their specific variety of running around. My father had found that if you sit on the far left corner of the terrace just after sunrise the valley below looks like it belongs to you personally.
We left before any of us were ready. Not because we had to. Because we had only booked four days.
