Is there hope for India’s dying wastelands?

Up in the sky, a shikra wheels and circles on outspread wings and the trees here are crammed with yellow-footed green pigeons which explode in surprising numbers from them. There’s the background chatter of rosy starlings mustering for their great journey back home, (to Eastern Europe, Central Asia) perching on bare branches occasionally engaging in practice flypasts. A rosefinch and his girlfriends, turn up too, as does, a zitting cisticola – earlier called the streaked fantail warbler, which I nicknamed the ‘scissor-snip’ warbler, because that’s what it sounded like. Somewhere beyond, parakeets are shrieking away and then we hear the wicked teasing call of the common hawk-cuckoo – the brainfever bird – as it probably eyes us and calls mockingly from deep within the shade. But this time, the joke is on it, because it is pleasantly cool, and we are not idiots tramping about in the midday sun looking for it while it sneers at us from cool shade! A tiny-tot coppersmith is hiccupping away from the top of a spindly tree – first facing one way then another, going ‘tok-tok-tok!’ Ah, gin-and-tonic in the afternoon!

I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to things botanical but am gobsmacked when we stop beside a scraggly looking tree, adorned with bunches of tiny translucent white pearls, looking for all the world as if it were wearing pearl ear drops. They’re pleasantly sweet to taste, with a sharp tangy aftertaste, and up ahead, are riper ones, these pale pink. They belong to the ‘toothbrush tree’ or peelu, botanically called Salvadora persica, and when the berries ripen fully, they’ll become little rubies.

Finally, we reach our destination: the golden palash. The ground beneath is littered with fallen blooms, but there are plenty up on the branches, attracting sunbirds like magnets. The petals are downy – and a lovely soft gold. We pay our respects and walk on, towards the end of the smaller water body, where a huddle of shovellors accompanied by gadwalls are still lurking, much to Faiyaz’s surprise.

You look around and then suddenly what he’s been explaining to us all along strikes you: all that you see, this lovely wild jungle, is not the work of crusty old Mother Nature but the work of man. The grass, the shrubs, the trees, everything has been planted with meticulous planning that horticulturists employ using geometry and trigonometry to create sterilised gardens like Versailles or the Mughal Gardens.

Here, they had a huge issue with the extreme salinity of the soil, and first put in plants which thrived on a high salt diet – and sucked it out of the ground. Not all of it – the soil is still pretty saline – but enough to make other native plants grow. The notorious Prosopis juliflora (Vilayati keekar) was another problem they had to contend with. As they wanted to replicate the natural ecosystems found in the Yamuna basin, they had to burrow into the past and find out what those were. This was no overnight miracle that they wrought: each step took years to come to fruition and only then could the next step be taken. I remember well the barren ‘wasteland’ this place used to be back when they started – in 2002 or 2003 – and it’s difficult to believe that it’s that same godforsaken wilderness.

What hits you harder is when you realise that it is so much easier to destroy all this in no time at all, to hack and burn rather than to plant and grow. And that there are probably countless ‘wastelands’ all over India, waiting for their rehabilitation and rewilding, just like this one had been.