My young cousin planned a visit for the family to Tikli Bottom. This is a property at the bottom of the Tikli hills, off Gurgaon, where the Aravallis rise for the one last time to eventually run off in undulations into the flood plains of the Yamuna. This is a property at the bottom of the Tikli hills and hence called as Tikli Bottom. This is a resort opne and yet closed for tourists for the owners, now the late Howard couple, Anne and Martin were discerning as to who should enter their premises. Presently, their daughter being more pragmatic and responsive to inflation and kind enough to retain most of the huge staff on the premises is more lenient towards filmwallahs who seem to be shooting daily there. As far as tourists are concerned, the property holds on to its grounds, allowing very little guests only after detailed scrutiny.

Tikli Bottom is a British bungalow of the days of the Mutiny, but what strikes me is that it was built in the vintage of heritage only in the 1990’s. Every wedge in the wall, every step in the courtyard and every nook of the stairways is constructed with the precision of the aeons of time that the style has seen. Filling the space inside the bungalow are furniture and Knick knacks, curios, paintings, photographs, artefacts and crafts collected carefully from the itinerant banjaras and iterating bazaars of India. While one can still think the building being built in a retro style, one was astounded at the prospect that all of such stuff could also be accessed in the present times, perhaps from auction houses. The owner told us that the collection of curios and paintings and the furniture were part of their ancestral legacy as members of many generations of the family had spent the service careers in India.

As we looked around the grounds of the property, which partly was built as a patio, partly as a drive way, in part a lawn and blending on all directions into a farmland, I sensed that in the mind of the owners space was organized just in the manner of a typical North Indian where dwelling in which a home with a garden must look like a hotel and a farm house all at once.

The hospitality was typically of an English farm as we read in Enid Blyton – the present owner and her staff treated us like children back from hostels, lavishing us with snacks and drinks and then insisting that we eat more of the food laid out generously on tables with white crocheted cloth. When Madhusree opted for a foot massage, the mood swung back into a hotel spa.

The farm makes honey and marmalade, so typical English. But where the property becomes India is in the landscaping of its grounds. Here the idea of the owner is neither to show off her flowers or trees, but to plan each hedge and shrub and the acacias in a manner to bring out the beauty of the Aravallis. The garden of the property is a fashion accessory for the beauty of the Tikli hills to bloom.

What endears in the property is the deep love that the owners have felt for the countryside, this Godforsaken village of a backward state of Haryana, dry, dreary and desperate for civilization. There are a few farmhouse properties along the road to Tikli Bottom, razed out grounds, artificial grass, garish gadgets set up to catch the attention of the passers-by. There is no purpose of these properties other than crass tourism of the loud louts, those of whom must be kept firmly off the grounds of Tikli Bottom.

Aesthetic of the property is its ownership of the Nature in which it not only ensconces itself but defines itself as a sense of belonging. Beauty is not only for the eyes of the beholder, it is a positioning of the soul which engages with and embraces the cosmos, both as its present as well as in its future hope and indeed as its distant origin beyond the dimensions of Time.