Hill homes in Ananthagiri Hills, Telangana

Ananthagiri is the wooded ridge above Vikarabad, roughly ninety kilometres west of Hyderabad, and it is where the Musi river begins. The first water surfaces as a spring inside the Anantha Padmanabha Swamy temple, and from there the river runs east into Osman Sagar and Himayat Sagar and eventually through the middle of the city. That one fact explains why a fairly modest set of hills carries some of the densest forest left in Telangana.

Building here is plateau building rather than hill-station building. Villages in this belt use rubble stone walls set in mud, a flat roof of earth laid over palmyra or teak rafters and rolled hard, and a pyol along the front wall for sitting out. The roof is a working surface, used for drying and for sleeping through the hot months. None of it is picturesque and all of it is well suited to a place that gets four dry months and then a great deal of rain at once.