On a dewy morning in early May, a man named Jogi finished his taxi round dropping children at schools in Ranikhet. He came home and resumed a quarrel he had been having with his parents. The fight became uglier and louder. Jogi pulled out a sari belonging to his wife, and declared that he would hang himself from the nearby tree. Go ahead, his parents said sarcastically.

Deodars, a variety of cedar, are massive. Their branches start high up on pillar-like trunks and grow parallel to the earth. They are difficult to climb, but Jogi was a tall, athletic 30-year-old. He clambered up the tree and used the sari as a noose. He died before any shocked onlookers could intervene. His parents swore to the police they had no idea he would take them at their word. Gossips observed that they did not publicly shed a tear. His wife had left him a fortnight before, broken by his savage beatings. She did not come to his cremation.

Jogi’s family is one of several living in rented rooms in a once-grand colonial bungalow that has become tenements. Located in the dip of a hillside next to a ravine, it overlooks an arc of Himalayan snow peaks. On that absurdly beautiful day, as a man’s body hung from a deodar, the sky was a gaudy blue and the morning symphony of thrushes and barbets was on.

I often came across Jogi. My last conversation with him was about his dog, a shaggy creature who came loping out from behind a blue van he was cleaning, barking at me. Jogi told his dog to lay off “aunty” and assured me the dog’s bark was more sound than bite. We chatted for a few minutes before I walked on.

Most people later reported the same pleasantness from him when he was well, but at other times his mental health problems triggered erratic behaviour. Then he would order his dog to attack people and hurtle about in his car, almost driving into rock faces. The day before he killed himself, he had crashed his car and broken its rear windscreen. After his wife left, he began beating up his parents and threatened the neighbours. He picked fights with other taxi drivers.

Jogi studied at a small Hindi school called Sarasvati Vidya Mandir, above the market. He did not progress beyond class eight. This is how it is for most of Ranikhet’s boys; girls do better at school. Like his friends, he did daily-wage labour at times, or played cricket. He had a reputation for being helpful, unless he was in the grip of mental health issues. His parents bought him the secondhand taxi van – an occupation – and an income. They got him married.

This is the template for most young men’s lives in the lower Himalayas, including Ranikhet, a town set up in the 19th century and dominated since by army regiments.

Army personnel live in their own boxes here, all needs catered for. The grand bungalows are owned by wealthy people who come up for a few days each year. The rest of the population is semi-rural, with no prospect of employment. The area is free of industry. Businesses are a non-starter in a place so cut off. Rocky hillsides are interspersed with meagre terraced plots, good only for subsistence. People grow greens and tubers around their homes and have a few cows, goats, or hens: basic food and a little income. Women cut grass and collect firewood. There is a relentless grind to overcome shortages of every kind.

My husband and I run an independent publishing house from here and in the early days we had jobseekers at our door. It was hard to explain the economics of small publishing, and see their crestfallen faces. The Indian finance minister recently brushed away economists’ gloom over “jobless growth”, but the fact is that growth in employment is close to zero and India’s impressive GDP growth figure is meaningless to people in the hinterland.

Anuradha Roy

Every street corner in Ranikhet has knots of lounging men shooting the breeze because there is nothing else to do. Most haven’t finished school. They stare at phone screens and dream of escaping to the big towns. A few find ill-paid odd jobs locally as waiters and handymen. Those who make it to a city return defeated. They cadge money off relatives, buy a bottle or two, choose a hillside, make a bonfire, drink. Stretches of forest are strewn with their broken glass. The mountains are vast and stunning. But this is a rural rat trap.

Many drive taxis as Jogi used to. But tourism has dwindled. This is the idyllic town where mountaineers Edmund Hillary and Frank Smythe started off on famous climbs. Small mountaineering companies, mostly branch offices of outfits in the west, have reported a drop in bookings and have laid off staff. It seems foreign hikers are no longer coming to India because it is considered unsafe for women. The pilgrim routes are beset by landslides, while the popularity of middle-class driving holidays means Indian tourists travel in their own cars. Taxis idle in long, seething ranks.

With such hopelessness, the impulse for violence is a hair’s breadth away. Jogi would have known of the tourist couple robbed and murdered by their driver, Raju Das, in Dehradun in 2014. Both Jogi and Raju Das were in the news for a few days. But many like them, suicidal or murderous, remain unnoticed.

Jogi’s taxi-van is still parked outside the house. The white shroud draped over its missing back windshield gives it a creepy air. The dog has disappeared. Jogi’s mother has taken to showing every visitor his wedding album. Obsessively. He towers over his tiny red-gold bride in the pictures, smiling and handsome and ready for life.