For most of the afternoon, the mountains had been invisible.
Heavy monsoon clouds hung over the hills outside Pokhara, obscuring the Annapurna range. Rain had passed through Deumadi, a small village about 1,400 metres above sea level, leaving the stone pathways damp and the surrounding vegetation glistening.
Beyond the cottages and flowering gardens of GCC Resort, there was little to see but successive layers of grey. Then the clouds began to move.
First came the outline of Machhapuchhare, the mountain better known as Fish Tail. Its steep, snow-covered summit appeared through a break in the clouds, though the distinctive twin peaks that give the mountain its name were not visible from this angle.
Farther along the horizon, Annapurna II and Annapurna IV gradually emerged.
From the resort, the mountains appeared above a hillside of bamboo and flowering plants. Morning glory vines, with their purple-blue flowers, climbed over old stone walls. Strings of multicoloured prayer flags stretched between buildings and trees. A brick cottage with a green metal roof stood partly concealed by vegetation. Birds called from the surrounding forest.
There were few visitors.
GCC Resort, whose name stands for Global Centre for Conscience, occupies a quiet hillside near Thulakot, away from the tourist traffic of central Pokhara. Its cottages are built with exposed brick, local stone and timber. A short walk leads to a hilltop temple, from which the surrounding valleys and Begnas Lake can be seen.
The entrance carries a yellow sign identifying the property as a "Retreat for Conscience."
Another sign, painted by hand, offers a more concise statement of its owner's philosophy: "Small is beautiful, less is more."
The owner is Akku Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi freedom fighter, businessman and former chairman of the Liberation War Museum's board of trustees. He helped introduce Pizza Hut and KFC to Bangladesh and spent much of his professional life building businesses and institutions in Dhaka.
Seven years before my visit in early 2024, he and his wife, Monica, had left that life behind and moved to this village in the Himalayan foothills. They had not come simply to retire.
"This was barren land before we settled here and transformed the place," Akku told me the following morning as we walked along a trail leading towards Thulakot hill.
He pointed towards the trees and vegetation around us. When the couple arrived, he said, much of the land was bare. They began planting trees, cultivating fruit and flowers, and working with villagers to restore the surrounding environment.
"If I say I will leave this place, the villagers would tie me up," he said, laughing. "They love me although I am such an angry man. Why? Because I brought life to this place. And I included them in everything."
He looked around at the grounds he and Monica had spent seven years developing.
"I don't import anything from outside. We grow it all here."
For a man who spent decades pursuing business opportunities, Akku had become preoccupied with a different question… how little could he and Monica consume while still living well?
Before arriving in Deumadi, I had spoken with Akku by telephone about the GCC Resort. He described the property as an experiment in ecological restoration.
"Our space is created to regenerate the ecosystem and biodiversity," he said. "That is our mission and vision."
The project began with planting.
"We are planting trees and, in seven years, we have brought about a great change. Birds, animals, flora and fauna have returned. We have fruit trees and flowers that are only for animals."
He said the resort uses no pesticides or chemical fertilisers, serves no frozen food or carbonated drinks, and avoids plastic. The couple have tried to make the operation dependent on local production rather than distant suppliers.
The buildings follow similar principles.
"Our buildings are made with local stone, crafted by local people," Akku said. "We used red clay and black clay for the mortar, and only enough cement to meet earthquake safety standards."
The property is full of reminders of these commitments.
Hand-painted wooden boards point visitors towards nearby trails and settlements. Others carry instructions about plastic pollution, biodiversity and environmental protection. Beside one brick wall, a blackboard carries a quotation attributed to the writer and conservationist John Muir: "The miracle is not to fly in the air or to walk on the water but to walk on the earth."
A yellow wooden sign reads "Jai Bangla." Nearby, another offers directions to Thulakot and surrounding walking routes.
The signs have the informal appearance of a place assembled gradually, rather than designed all at once. So does the resort itself. Its stone walls are partly covered with climbing plants, its paths follow the hillside, and its buildings sit among the trees rather than on a cleared terrace.
Akku sees this as part of a larger responsibility.
"I am a climate activist," he said. "This is my penance for being part of the generation that contributed to climate disaster and global warming."
The ambition is considerable for such a small property. But the couple have little interest in measuring its success by conventional hotel-industry standards. During my stay, it became apparent how little known GCC Resort remained.
Even several people we spoke to in Pokhara, including local friends, had never heard of Deumadi or the retreat.
That seemed surprising. The property has mountain views comparable to those from Sarangkot, one of Pokhara's best-known viewpoints. On a clear day, the Annapurna range fills the northern horizon. The location has many of the qualities that attract visitors to Nepal: mountain scenery, walking trails, rural settlements and relative proximity to a major tourist city.
Someone with Akku's business experience would have recognised its commercial potential. I mentioned that the resort could attract far more visitors with greater publicity.
"Thank God tourists don't know this place," he replied. He was serious.
Sarangkot, he said, had become ghinji — crowded and congested. He did not want the same thing to happen to Deumadi. "We are lucky this remains almost a secret."
The preference for remaining small is rooted in an idea that has interested Akku since he was a young man.
After Bangladesh's Liberation War, while living in the United States and preparing to return home, he encountered the philosophy later associated with EF Schumacher's 1973 book, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.
Schumacher challenged the assumption that larger organisations, greater production and continuous economic expansion necessarily produced better societies. He argued for economic arrangements suited to human needs, local communities and environmental limits.
For Akku, those arguments became a lasting influence.
"After the Liberation War, when I was in America and planning to return home, I was already thinking about what I wanted to do," he said. "I wanted to build a community based on that philosophy."
It took him several decades to attempt it.
At GCC Resort, the idea shapes decisions about everything from construction materials and food to the number of visitors the property can accommodate. The resort provides the couple with a livelihood. But they have resisted turning it into a larger commercial operation.
For Akku, the distinction matters. He has spent much of his life building businesses. He now wants to see whether a business can serve a community without continually expanding.
Inside one of the resort's brick-walled rooms, Akku and Monica sat together on a low sofa covered with checked cushions.
Behind them, a dark display board held photographs of Himalayan landscapes, sunsets and mountain villages. Above the photographs were colourful images of Buddhist and Hindu religious figures. Bamboo poles framed the display. The room was modest, furnished with the practical simplicity found throughout the property.
Akku, with his greying beard, glasses and hair tied back, wore a jacket over a green shirt. Monica sat beside him, smiling as she recalled their first years in Nepal. For her, the transition had not been easy.
When Akku began talking seriously about moving away from Dhaka in 2015, she was uncertain whether she could adapt to rural life. "I was raised in luxury," she said, smiling. "Then, for the first time in my life, I was bitten by two leeches."
There were more consequential difficulties.
She did not speak Nepali. Everyday conversations were a struggle. She found it difficult to understand the people around her or develop the trust necessary to build relationships.
"I didn't understand their language," she said. "I couldn't trust people because I couldn't communicate with them." For someone accustomed to the familiarity and conveniences of Dhaka, the move required adjustments that went far beyond a change of address.
Seven years later, Monica speaks fluent Nepali. She has become closely involved in the resort and the surrounding community. The place she initially approached with hesitation has become home.
Asked how she now feels about living there, she answered immediately. "Oh, I love it."
She described the past seven years as the most rewarding period of her life, filled with experiences that her earlier circumstances had rarely allowed.
"For 50 years I learned everything from books," she said. "Now I see it with my own eyes." Much of that learning has come through close observation of the landscape.
She pointed towards the ridges surrounding the valley.
"Our sun sets over that hill today. In summer it moves towards Sarangkot. Come back in October and you'll see it setting from the Thulakot side."
She had learned to recognise the seasonal movement of sunlight, changes in the weather, the flowering patterns of plants and the behaviour of birds. "Watching these little changes every day makes you realise how much there is to learn."
The couple's decision to settle in Deumadi has also changed how Monica thinks about the people around her.
In Dhaka, she said, she had often understood poverty through assumptions about deprivation and hardship. Living in a rural community complicated that view.
"There is beauty in poverty as well," she said. "Whether people are financially well off or not, they are often perfectly content in their own lives."
She has become particularly conscious of the language used to describe people who have less money. "Whenever I say ahare about someone, I am treating them as inferior," she said, using the Bengali expression of pity. "Who am I to decide whether they are happy or not?"
The change in her outlook was not immediate.
She had to learn the language, establish relationships and become comfortable with a life in which many of the conveniences she once considered essential were absent.
The experience has also altered her relationship with possessions.
"You may own a house, a car or jewellery," she said. "But they shouldn't own you. Your happiness shouldn't disappear because your car is damaged or because you don't have a bigger house."
She calls this detachment.
It does not require renouncing material things, she explained. It means refusing to make personal happiness dependent on acquiring or preserving them.
"I learned that balance here."
In the open-air dining area, a breeze moved through the trees while she spoke. Beyond the roofline, the valley descended into layers of forested hills. Monica looked towards the mountains and continued.
"What is life all about? I think I have only begun to understand that in these last seven years. But there is still so much to learn."
She does not regard her new life as the conclusion of a personal transformation. "We keep changing, we keep learning, and that is how we evolve. Transformation is an ongoing process."
Then she laughed at the idea that changing one's habits and beliefs should be considered unusual.
"People say, 'You've changed.' Well, I am supposed to change. If I remain the same person I was at 20 — if I still believe I cannot live without a particular face cream or buying new shoes every other day — then how have I grown?"
She paused.
"Growth is painful. Every birth is painful. Even a tree grows by cracking its seed. But that is how we evolve."
At Thulakot, a small temple stands on a hill overlooking the surrounding valleys.
Prayer flags hang from poles and branches. A metal bell, suspended from a rusted frame, stands beside a large tree. The ground is uneven, bordered by low stone walls and patches of grass.
Akku approached the bell and leaned towards it.
He wore a pale green shirt and dark trousers, his hair tied back. Beyond the temple, the hills receded into a pale, hazy distance. It was here that our conversation turned to Bangladesh.
Akku was a young man when the Liberation War began in 1971. He fought in the war and continues to identify himself proudly as a "sepoy of '71" — a soldier of 1971.
The experience has remained central to his identity.
After independence, he became involved in business and institution-building. He helped establish the Liberation War Museum, an institution dedicated to preserving the history and memory of the conflict, and later served as chairman of its board of trustees.
His career took him into the corporate world, where he became associated with the arrival of international restaurant chains in Bangladesh.
But the war had left psychological scars that did not disappear with professional success. He spoke of carrying those memories for decades.
Life in the Himalayas, he suggested, had given him the space to live with them differently.
At the temple, surrounded by prayer flags and mountain air, his attention seemed to have moved away from the demands that had occupied much of his adult life.
"I don't need anything," he said. "If I die, my people know what to do with my body. I don't own anything. That is the beauty. That is what my father taught me."
His words were matter-of-fact.
He had spent decades building organisations and businesses. Now, in his seventies, he seemed less interested in what he could accumulate than in what he could leave functioning without him.
The change had not diminished his appetite for physical challenges.
At 73, despite having undergone multiple heart surgeries, Akku had recently completed the trek to Annapurna Base Camp, at an elevation of more than 4,000 metres.
He did not describe the journey primarily as a sporting achievement. For him, it was a pilgrimage.
"I feel blessed," he said. "Going to Annapurna helped me understand why each of us has to do a little, even if it is only for our own community."
He had become impatient with the habit of waiting for institutions or governments to solve every problem.
"Waiting for governments or other people to solve everything is escapism. We cannot keep pointing fingers at others. Each one of us must act."
That belief is reflected in the work at Deumadi.
The couple did not arrive with a plan to reform the entire village. They began with a piece of land, planted trees, hired local workers and gradually developed a resort that could support itself. For Akku, the scale was appropriate.
His ambition was no longer to build something large enough to attract national attention. It was to demonstrate that a modest intervention could produce measurable changes in a particular place.
The hillside around GCC Resort had become his latest institution, though one with fewer employees and considerably less revenue than the businesses he once managed.
Back at the resort, Akku spoke about money with an ease that seemed unusual for someone who had spent so much of his life in business.
"We are struggling," he said, laughing. "We don't even buy new clothes anymore. We are not rich." He appeared untroubled by the admission. "I have been working for 50 years, and I am worth nothing. Believe me. And it doesn't matter."
He was speaking about personal wealth rather than the value of the institutions he had helped establish.
"We come empty-handed and we leave empty-handed. Can you take your crores with you when you die?"
He remained interested in business. At the time of our conversation, he was planning to relaunch Dolce Vita Gelato, his Italian ice cream venture, in Dhaka.
But he had no intention of returning to the city to oversee its daily operations. Instead, he wanted to build a team capable of running the business independently. "You build a team because you don't stay forever," he said.
He applied the same reasoning to the Liberation War Museum and the international restaurant brands he had helped bring to Bangladesh.
"I built the Liberation War Museum. Whether I am there or not no longer matters. The institution will remain. Pizza Hut, KFC — they have been built. No one can take that away."
The point was not that his involvement had become irrelevant. It was that a successful institution should not depend indefinitely on the person who created it. That idea had become increasingly important as he grew older.
He was also critical of what he saw as the impatience of younger entrepreneurs in Bangladesh.
"People in Bangladesh don't have patience," he said. "Everybody wants to become a multimillionaire overnight. But it doesn't work like that."
He had spent five decades working before reaching a stage of life in which he could choose to live differently.
The freedom he now enjoyed had required years of professional effort and financial decisions. He did not pretend that anyone could simply abandon work and move to the mountains.
When I told him that his life in Deumadi resembled what many exhausted young professionals in Dhaka dreamed of, he smiled. "That is the way," he said. "Focus on yourself. But it takes time. I could only do this when I was 65."
He advised patience.
"Work hard and keep moving towards it — you'll get there. Ultimately, we don't need much." Then he acknowledged something that had made his own transition possible. "I was lucky. I had a good partner. Thank God my wife agreed."
The remark drew a smile from Monica.
Their move had been a joint decision, but it had required different sacrifices from each of them. For Akku, Deumadi represented the opportunity to pursue an old intellectual and environmental ambition. For Monica, it meant learning an unfamiliar language, adjusting to a rural community and reconsidering habits formed over a lifetime.
They had arrived at the same place by somewhat different routes.
Akku had also developed a more philosophical understanding of how they ended up there. "I now believe destination and cosmic force are real things," he said. "Sometimes you simply cannot prevent them."
By late afternoon, another spell of rain had passed through the hills.
The clouds shifted again, revealing Machhapuchhare above the lower ridges. The mountain's triangular summit stood against a pale opening in the sky, while much of the surrounding Annapurna massif remained obscured.
From the resort, a cottage with a green roof occupied the foreground. Prayer flags crossed the garden below it. Beyond the trees, successive mountain ridges faded into the evening haze.
The landscape had changed repeatedly during the day. Monica had been watching these changes for seven years.
"What is life all about?" she asked. "I think I have only begun to understand that in these last seven years." For Akku, the answer seemed somewhat simpler. He had spent much of his life building things that he hoped would endure. In Deumadi, he was still building, but with a different sense of scale.
As evening settled over the hillside, the mountains began disappearing behind clouds again. The couple had seen this happen countless times.
They would be there to watch it again the following morning.
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