Kaaya has, at different points, become a residency space for people working in very different registers — writers seeking solitude, and practitioners exploring stillness and meditation. Neither was planned as a formal programme. Both emerged because someone asked, and the place turned out to be right for it.
Writers in residence
We had the pleasure of hosting Tripta Batra as writer in residence at Kaaya — someone who has long facilitated workshops on subjects ranging from the joy of learning to the search for meaning, fear and trust, and creative writing itself. Her approach was always to shape each session around the group in front of her, rather than a fixed curriculum.
The structure was simple: private space for most of the day, shared moments around the dining table, and a few structured hours — part joint exploration, part one-to-one conversation. We spent that time in the quiet of the hills, away from the noise of the city, working through the physicality of words.
Meditation and stillness
Kaaya was never designed with meditation in mind. The space evolved organically — mud floors, cob walls, stone roofs, blending into the wooded landscape around it — and that rawness lent itself more naturally to imagination and creativity than to formal spiritual practice.
Even so, visitors often remarked on something they felt here, something many connected to a kind of stillness or energy, without quite naming it. For years, requests for yoga and meditation camps went unanswered simply because Kaaya wasn’t built to host them at scale.
That began to shift after we hosted a happiness programme for village children and were encouraged, almost on a whim, to attempt something more advanced. We didn’t know where the resources would come from or how long it would take — but slowly, it came together. Kaaya is now, tentatively, becoming a space where the spiritual pursuits of the self can be explored alongside its responsibilities to the neighbourhood. A new, still-unfolding thread in what this place can hold.
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