A Walk Through The Monsoon Forests

If life always finds a way, then the monsoon is life on steroids.

Walk through a wilderness in the monsoon, and your eyes will be saturated with colour, your senses glutted with a rich diversity of things to see, smell, and hear. Different layers of the forest canopy seem to become one breathing, dripping entity, all thirsty for a bit more life-giving water and a slice of the sunny sky. Leaves of plants will have grown to the size of plates. Stems become tumescent or woody. Leaves and logs on the ground will be covered with velvety mosses, perky mushrooms, or bioluminescent fungus. Seeds will take root in the nook of a larger tree. Closer home, plants will germinate anywhere the alchemy of rainwater touches a complex, ruched surface – be it an old carpet on your terrace, a crevice between the staircase and the wall, within mouldy shoes or other odds and ends.

This monsoon, I went to the Aravalli biodiversity park, in the heart of South Delhi. The rain had stopped for a while, and a new-looking blue sky had emerged. In the welcome sunshine, butterflies basked. They sat on a variety of grasses, looking like psychedelic fruit. The monsoon and its aftermath is the time to see wings – those of dusty and colourful butterflies, and glassy-winged, jewel-like dragonflies. A storey above the butterflies, dragonflies whizzed about with a particular mania. Birds called from hidden depths of trees.

The ground, saturated with water, spouted mushrooms and toadstools wherever the sun did not fall. Different kinds of bees and wasps came to flowers like the pink, bell-shaped Jungli tilli. Blister beetles, striped red-and-black, advertising their toxicity with their alarming colours – bit on berries. Flowers nodded with the weight of wasps. Ants marched in solemn lines on the ground. A large Danaid Eggfly butterfly—one that mimics the toxic Plain tiger butterfly—sat on the ground, opening and closing her wings, resembling a beating pulse. Each step seemed like a cathedral for a new creature, and familiar places looked refreshed and luxuriant with the rains. The area was enchanted with the spell of life. There was something going on all the time, in each part of the park.

Yet Aravalli biodiversity park once was a mined-out, degraded area. Just like Delhi’s first biodiversity park, Yamuna biodiversity park, situated near the spot where the Yamuna river enters Delhi. Yamuna park was so barren there were saline patches on the ground. In both parks, the land appeared to bleed from pollution and effluent. A team of scientists was tasked with reassembling the place, by putting together plant, forest, and grass communities native to Delhi. The method was scientific, as opposed to random. Successions of plant communities were planned, with the first line of defence created by planting grasses that aerated the soil, increasing fertility so other plants could grow. The outcome was a place that looks neither manicured, nor even like a forest. Instead, these are wildernesses close to how a native Delhi woodland would look – a patch of grasses, a line of forests, a hollow of a wetland, coming together like patterns in a tapestry.

The government recently announced a ‘Nagar Van’ scheme, which will focus on raising 200 forests in cities. As a principle, this is an excellent idea. With huge Carbon footprints and subsequent heat islands, buildings shoulder to shoulder with each other, and the particular fatigue that urban life brings, I would argue cities need forests even more than towns or smaller places do. Our forest departments are usually good at raising forests – they make many plantations of single species, like commercially important teak trees. But there are two things to note here.

Firstly, we need to move away from forests as plantations. Instead of planting from a list of well-known trees, we must raise a variety of shrubs, grasses, and trees which are native to that area.

Secondly, paying homage to native ecosystems and wildernesses also means that we don’t just erect forests. We create a necklace with different kinds of stones – a mosaic of systems like riverscapes, rolling grassland, and water catchment areas.

As examples, Mumbai ‘Nigam Vans’ could mean both mangroves – trees that grow on the edge of the sea; and mudflats – flat areas that have no trees but are an important stopping point for migratory birds and marine life. In cities of Rajasthan, we don’t need imported cactus plants. Instead, native scrub forest and grassland—areas that don’t really look like forests —should be recreated.

The monsoon is the time when all forests look impenetrable, taller, and fiercer. The forest has teeth and claws. Perhaps because tall forests look so memorable, we expect all wildernesses to look like a forest with green trees. Delhi has a rocky ridge forest overrun with invasive, fast-growing Mexican Prosopis Juliflora trees that perform no real ecological function. And despite being touted as a green capital, tree expert Pradip Krishen points out the wrong trees have been planted – favouring thirsty, evergreen trees over locally suitable ones.

Foreign but pretty-looking trees are planted under flyovers and smattered along railway tracks, or not planted at all. The latest science finds that abundance of native species has fallen by 20% since 1900, worldwide. It’s not hard to see why.

At the end of the day, we need to look away from picture-postcard snapshots of commercial plantations that may one day become furniture. More ecosystem services, and more life, corresponds with greater species diversity. Let’s look for recreations of our local tangles – thorny, scrubby, saline, moist, submerged – to be welcomed where they thrive indigenously. As rainwater drums the earth, this is one sort of local pride that should keep the beat.

Neha Sinha works with the Bombay Natural History Society. Views expressed are personal.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.