“There’s a trip to a sacred forest outside Delhi,” said my friend. “But you have to get up at 5.30am. Can you make it?” Well – sacred forests are rare in this neck of the woods, if you see what I mean, so it was a chance not to be missed, especially as our guide was to be Pradip Krishan – charismatic author of a gem of a book -“Trees of Delhi”.
Leaving the main road and Gurgaon’s skyscrapers behind, we bounced over a red earth track into a landscape of thorny scrub and quartzite boulders. Would this have been the scene that greeted Delhi’s many invaders – Tughlak, Timur and Co – as their armed hordes descended on the city? Not quite – one of the most common trees around us was mesquite – an aggressive alien from South America unwisely introduced by the British into the planting scheme for New Delhi. Since then it has followed the example of human conquerors and spread everywhere.
But Pradip summoned us to a rocky outcrop, where we gazed into a steep valley full of uniformly sage-green foliage. This, said Pradip triumphantly, was the sacred forest and the nearest thing to the original tree cover of Delhi. It was uniform because all the trees were one. Not just one species – the dhau – but probably literally- one individual. Dhau had perfected cloning long before Dolly the sheep was ever thought of. It spreads by suckers, so all the trees of the valley probably grew from a single specimen and are genetically identical.
There was a crashing noise and a peacock, all turquoise and bronze, flew in a stately way across the valley to land in a tree close to us. Peacocks are quite bulky birds and you rarely see them so far off the ground.
On the valley floor, just one or two large banyans with dark emerald leaves broke the grey-green sea and at the top of the slope were frankincense trees with their scented gum. Down to the left, we could see the top of a very slim dome marking the shrine to the Baba to whom the forest was sacred.
Pradip said, and I’m still not sure if he was serious (you can’t always tell), that the Baba had a bee in his bonnet about thin domes and even wrote a treatise on how thin a dome could be. Indeed, the dome on his shrine is a monument to all that is svelte.
Sometime in the last century, so the story goes, the Baba, feeling his time had come, walked into a cave in the hillside and never re-appeared. The shrine marks the cave-mouth. “But you never know”, said Pradip a tad irreverently, “he may have walked right through the hill and still be wandering around on the other side!”
Ever since the the holy man’s disappearance, the herdsman of the area (the Gujjars) have protected the forest around his shrine. Pradip says he has even seen people dragging their animals back from the forest edge, so that none of the trees should be damaged.
Watching out for stray Babas, we dropped down into the valley, meeting a sleek tame antelope, a grizzled black dog and a grinning puppy on the way, and walked up the stream-bed to the white-washed shrine. From unglazed windows under the slim dome we gazed out at the lattice of tree-tops touched by the morning light.
Then someone suggested dosas for breakfast and spurred by the thought we sweated back up the slope to the busy world beyond the valley.
Photos by Barbara
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