The unplanned trip to Himachal happened because Sahil sent a voice note at eleven thirty on a Wednesday night.
Not a long one. Twelve seconds. We had not spoken properly in almost two years and before that it had been eighteen months and before that there had been a wedding where we had all promised to do better and then done exactly what we always did which was get absorbed back into our separate lives in separate cities and let the months stack up without noticing.
Twelve seconds.
He said: “Guys I have found something. Trust me. Four days. Himachal. I am serious this time.”
The group chat had been quiet for six weeks before that message.
Within four minutes there were eleven replies.
That told me something about how much all of us had been waiting for someone to just say it first.
Who We Are and Why This Trip Was Overdue
Seven of us. One group chat called something embarrassing that I will not put in writing. Friends from engineering college in Delhi who had scattered across the country and one of us to Bangalore and one to Pune and Sahil to Dubai for three years before coming back changed in the quiet way that living somewhere else changes you.
The last time all seven of us had been in the same place at the same time was Raunak’s wedding in 2022.
Before that it was New Year’s 2020. Before the world changed and took our easy assumptions about seeing each other regularly along with it.
Four years. The group chat had survived. The friendships had survived. But there is a difference between surviving and being lived in and we had all been doing the former for long enough that none of us had said out loud how much we missed the latter.
Sahil said it first. Twelve seconds. Eleven replies.
The Plan That Was Not a Plan
There was no itinerary.
This is important because every previous attempt at organising a group trip had died in the itinerary stage. Someone would start a shared document. Someone else would add comments. A third person would suggest dates that did not work for the fourth person. The document would sit open in a browser tab for three weeks and then quietly close.
This time Sahil said: I have booked four rooms at a property in Nahan. Come Thursday. Leave Sunday. That is the plan.
Nahan. Most of us had never heard of it.
Sahil had stayed at The Sirmour Retreat six weeks earlier for work, alone, and had come back with that specific quality of restedness that made the rest of us slightly suspicious before we remembered to be curious.
He said: “I cannot explain what the place does. You have to just come.”
Seven people cleared four days of calendar with a speed that suggested those four days had always been available and we had simply been waiting for a reason to protect them.
We drove up in two cars on a Thursday morning. The kind of Thursday morning that feels like playing truant even when you have cleared the leave properly.
The Drive and What Happened to Seven People on a Mountain Road
Karan drove the first car. I drove the second.
We left Delhi at five in the morning and the city was still in that specific pre-dawn state where it has not yet decided to be difficult. By the time we crossed Ambala and the road started climbing, something was happening in both cars that I could only infer from the WhatsApp updates coming through on the dashboard.
Sahil sent a photograph of the hills from the first car window with no caption.
Then a voice note from Priya saying she had forgotten what it felt like to not be looking at a screen.
Then nothing for forty minutes which, from a group chat that usually runs to sixty messages a day, was its own kind of communication.
An unplanned trip to Himachal does this. Not because the road is dramatic. Because it is gradual. The change sneaks up on you. The plains give way to foothills and the foothills give way to something that starts to feel elevated in every sense and by the time you look up you are somewhere completely different from where you started and the person sitting next to you seems slightly different too.
Rohan, who had been in a difficult stretch at work that none of us had been able to reach him through properly, fell asleep in the first car somewhere past Ambala.
Sahil said later that it was the first time he had seen Rohan’s face fully relaxed in years.
He did not send that observation to the group chat. He told me at dinner. Some things are said quietly.
Arriving at The Sirmour Retreat
Nahan appeared just before noon. A town that exists entirely on its own terms and has no interest in performing for visitors. The market was going about its morning. People were doing ordinary things. The road curved through it and then climbed and The Sirmour Retreat appeared above the town in the Shivalik hills.
We pulled into the property and all seven of us got out of the cars at the same time.
And then nobody moved for a moment.
The Shivalik range opened in every direction. The valley below was completely still. The air had that quality that high altitude air has when you have been breathing city air for long enough to have forgotten the alternative.
Vikram, who is the most undemonstrative person in the group and has never in fifteen years of friendship said anything that could be described as gushing, put his hands on his hips, looked at the view, and said: “Okay Sahil.”
That was it. That was the review.
The Sirmour Retreat team came out to welcome seven people with a warmth and a calm that communicated immediately that this was not a place where a group of seven was going to feel like a logistical challenge. Names used correctly. Rooms ready. Chai appearing on the terrace before anyone had asked for it.
Sahil looked at me with the expression of someone who has been waiting to see people he loves arrive somewhere he has already fallen for.
What the First Afternoon Did to Seven Overworked People
We had made no plan for the afternoon.
This was Sahil’s specific instruction. No plan for the first afternoon. Just let the place do whatever it does.
What it did was this.
Within an hour of arriving, without anyone organising it, all seven of us were on the terrace. Not because someone had gathered us. Because the terrace was there and the Shivalik range was there and the valley below was there and all of those things together made anywhere else in the property feel like the wrong choice.
We sat in whatever configuration felt natural. Two of us at the far end. Three in the middle. Sahil and Rohan at the edge with their legs hanging slightly off the terrace wall the way we used to sit on the roof of the hostel in second year.
Nobody started a group activity. Nobody suggested anything. We just sat there and talked. Not about work. Not about plans. About things we had not talked about in years because group chats do not have the right conditions for them.
Priya talked about her mother’s health, which she had been carrying quietly for eight months and mentioning to no one.
Vikram talked about wanting to leave his current job and being afraid to say it out loud because saying it out loud makes it real.
Rohan said almost nothing for the first hour and then said everything for the next two.
The Shivaliks held all of it. That is the only way I know how to describe what the setting does. It is large enough and still enough and completely indifferent enough to everything you have been carrying that the carrying simply stops being necessary for a while.
The Unplanned Trip to Himachal That Became Something More
On the second morning the seven of us woke up at different times and ended up on the terrace at different times and nobody had arranged any of it.
By seven thirty we were all there.
The valley was in mist. The hills above were in the first light. That quality of very early morning in the Shivaliks where the day has not yet made any commitments.
Chai arrived without being asked for.
Karan, who had been the most skeptical about the trip initially because four days was a significant chunk of a schedule that he keeps very tightly, looked at the mist and then looked around at all of us on that terrace and said something I have thought about many times since.
“This is the version of us I remember.”
He meant the hostel version. The version before careers and EMIs and the accumulated weight of becoming adults with responsibilities. The version that could sit somewhere without needing the sitting to be productive.
Nobody replied immediately. We all just sat with it.
Then Sahil said: “That version is still here. We just do not make room for it.”
That conversation, at seven thirty in the morning on a terrace in Nahan with chai going slightly cold in our hands, was the most important conversation we had had as a group in four years.
No group chat could have produced it. No weekend plan in Delhi could have created the conditions for it.
The unplanned trip to Himachal did.
What The Sirmour Retreat Did to the Group
I want to describe what the property specifically gave seven people who arrived carrying four years of distance.
Space. Real space. Not just physical space, though the terrace and the rooms and the garden gave everyone the room to be themselves rather than performing closeness in a small Airbnb somewhere. Space in the sense of no agenda. No tourist checklist. No pressure to maximise every hour.
The pool on the second afternoon became a two hour conversation that would not have happened anywhere else. Six people in the water with the Shivalik range visible in every direction, talking about things that only come up when the setting makes them feel appropriate.
The food gave us something to experience together rather than just consume. Himachali cuisine that made us stop talking at least three times over two dinners because something on the plate demanded full attention. The Madra. The Siddu. A dal that Priya said tasted like it had been made by someone who cared about whether we enjoyed it.
She is not someone who says things like that about food. The place was producing new versions of all of us.
The evenings were the best part. No plan. Terrace. Valley going dark. Lights of Nahan appearing below. Seven people who had been strangers to their own friendship for two years slowly, over three evenings, finding their way back into it.
“An unplanned trip to Himachal at The Sirmour Retreat gave seven people who had drifted something none of us had known how to arrange. Not the trip. The conditions for actually being together again. The hills removed everything that makes closeness difficult in ordinary life and what was left was what had always been there, waiting for a setting that knew how to hold it.”
Sahil, guest at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
The Day We Explored Nahan
On the third day Sahil took us into Nahan town.
He had been there six weeks earlier and had found things he wanted to show us.
We walked through the old market in the morning when the town was still finding its pace. A chai stall that cost twelve rupees and produced something better than anything available at our regular coffee spots in Delhi. A small temple at the end of the market that most visitors photograph from the street without going inside.
We went inside.
The courtyard had a quality of morning stillness that seven slightly hungover people from a big city found quietly affecting.
Vikram, who I do not think has voluntarily entered a temple in ten years, sat in the courtyard for fifteen minutes without being asked to leave.
He said nothing about it afterward and we did not ask.
In the afternoon the team at The Sirmour Retreat had mentioned Renuka Ji Lake, about forty kilometres from Nahan. We drove there on a whim.
We stayed for three hours.
The lake does something to a group of people that I have not found in any other place I have visited near Delhi. It asks for quiet. Not demanding it. Simply being so completely itself that quiet becomes the only appropriate response.
We drove back to The Sirmour Retreat as the sun was going behind the Shivaliks. The valley below the property was catching the last light in the way it catches it every evening, which is extraordinary and which does not get less extraordinary for happening regularly.
The Last Morning and What It Gave Us
Sunday came faster than any of us had planned for.
Not because we had not known it was coming. Because the trip had produced a quality of time that does not move the way ordinary time moves. Dense. Full. Worth more per hour than most hours we had spent in months.
We were all on the terrace by seven.
Nobody had suggested it. Nobody had set an alarm specifically for it. We had simply all understood, separately, that the last morning on that terrace was not something to sleep through.
The mist was thicker than the previous mornings. The valley below completely invisible. The hills above the mist already in the first light, the highest points of the Shivaliks emerging before everything else.
We sat there for almost two hours without deciding to sit there for two hours.
At some point Rohan said: “We should do this every year.”
Nobody argued. Nobody said that was unrealistic or that schedules would not allow it or that four days was hard to clear.
We all just said yes.
The kind of yes that means it.
What Happens When You Stop Planning and Just Go
The group chat has been different since we came back.
Not more messages. Different ones. Less logistics, less memes, more the kind of things that get sent when people feel like they are actually talking to each other rather than maintaining a connection.
Priya texted me separately two weeks after the trip to say that she had finally told her manager about needing flexible hours for her mother’s appointments. She said she had been thinking about the terrace conversation when she made the call.
Vikram handed in his notice at work ten days after we came back.
Rohan is sleeping properly for the first time in months. His wife told Priya who told me.
I am not going to say the unplanned trip to Himachal fixed everything for seven people. That would be too neat and too much credit for four days in the hills.
What it did was remind seven people who had forgotten how to be genuinely present with each other what that actually felt like. And then gave them enough of it, across three evenings and two mist-covered mornings and a lake and a terrace with chai that arrived without being asked for, to make the feeling last beyond the drive home.
What You Should Know Before You Go
The Sirmour Retreat is above Nahan town in the Shivalik hills of Sirmour district, Himachal Pradesh. Nahan is 290 kilometres from Delhi, roughly 100 kilometres from Chandigarh. Five to six hours by road from the capital. Under two hours from Chandigarh.
For a group of friends an unplanned trip to Himachal works because The Sirmour Retreat is intimate enough that seven people feel like the only guests in the world without feeling crowded into each other. The property has rooms that give everyone their own space and common areas that pull everyone back together without forcing it.
The pool matters more than you will expect it to. Go in the afternoon.
Tell the team it is a reunion trip when you book. They will understand what that means and arrange accordingly.
The best months are October through June. October specifically gives you post monsoon clarity in the Shivaliks that makes every outdoor moment on this kind of trip feel deliberately lit.
Do not make an itinerary for the first afternoon. That instruction sounds unnecessary and it is not.
One Last Thing
Sahil sent a voice note to the group chat three weeks after we came back.
Fifteen seconds this time.
He said: “Same time next year. I am serious. Someone set a reminder.”
Four minutes later there were eleven replies.
Same energy as the first time.
Some things do not need to be planned. They just need someone to say it first.
Sahil said it first.
