Neha Sinha: The wild city beneath Delhi's concrete

The city beside the layer of concrete

A sound cuts through the quiet, hibernating winter air.

Woo-woo, woo-woo-woo. The call is lovelorn, intense, and a bit of a cackle. It comes to me in the middle of the night, that time when the air is thick with a darkness so intense one must wait till morning to truly see something. But I don’t try to look. I wait to hear, my ears pricked, for the sound from my childhood. Did I dream it?

In Delhi of the early 1990s, this sound came as per schedule each day. As the sun slipped down, two things cut through the dusk, so sharp they sheared away the day’s weariness. One was a peacock calling, a lusty eow-eow-eeowen, followed by noisy flapping on to a eucalyptus tree that grew outside my home in north Delhi. The bird made his grand ascent every evening, settling into a somnolence that would stay undisturbed till morning. After this feathered event, came the second sound: woo-woos cutting through the gloaming. Jackals called to each other: one hooting, followed by another; charming not just because of their laughing, full-throated abandon, but also because they came in pairs.

The Delhi Ridge forest had more arms then, trickling out like embraces into the city. Through overgrown parks, large institutional complexes and areas with vegetation-laden radio towers, the calls of jackals intertwined with many more lives. And in earlier decades, wolves existed near jackals. The 1912 Gazetteer of Delhi details leopards, hyenas, hog deer, foxes, jackals, hare, and porcupines in Delhi, along with wolves. The wolves are long gone, so are the hog deer. The jackals remain, along with leopards and hyenas.

I remembered the sense-scape of our cities as rich and multi-layered. In the evenings of the 1990s, the hum of insects would fill the air, white noise of the best kind, soothing and speaking its own language. In the monsoons, frogs chuckled. Geckos and crickets made themselves heard too, and it would all mish-mash into one great organism from the outdoors.

I wanted to return to the sense-scape of my childhood: did the Capital still offer polyphony? To find out, I required a site that contained native diversity and resembled the past. I conducted surveys, and then found my place. Sanjay Van in the Ridge forest. I walked here over many years, an area full of brooks, old trees and the rumours of ghosts (if ghosts could indeed speak, surely they’d join the area’s chitinous chorus). Tuning in required either going early in the morning—for the dawn chorus of birds—or at night time, late, when the jackals gambolled freely, bounding as much as their woo-woos.

*****

I started with a monsoon night. At the mouth of the forest, hesitation held me back in a vice. How scary the dark is, and how deeply this scare is scored into our skin, a familiar, wrenching alarm which is meant to keep us safe. The dark has meant molestation, ugly memories that never go away, black rage against people whose criminal hands have moved over us. Forests and secluded beaches in rural places often form exceptions—they have the wholesomeness and moral certainty of the countryside, where life is slower and people recognised as kinder. The city has no such aspirations, and no such uniformity. The city’s defining feature is how much it stuns you constantly—in good and bad ways equally.

And so, I found I could not walk into Sanjay Van, where darkness, unadulterated and dense, spread itself like an ever-growing skein. There are times in life when our limbs want to move but our brain doesn’t comply. What holds us back is so ingrained that breaking its bonds feels like a betrayal; comic in the way it locks you down. Turning around seemed so right, I almost did it.

But the forest wasn’t done with me yet. As I hesitated, overthinking, weighing my options grain by grain, a bark ricocheted above my head. Years of birdwatching told me this was not a dog, but in fact an owl. The bird offered up a kind of time travel, from one stretch of darkness to another, jumping decades with the sheer force of a wild cry. Then, Barn owls sat on every other pole in the nights of my childhood; the lights were so dim—jammed with black midge-like insects—that the white owls themselves appeared like light: lunar-like, luminous. Now, Barn owls have reduced, and so have the millions of insects that filled every light holder—the former heavily impacted by rodenticides, the latter by chemical use. From the forest mouth, the bark came again, that of a Scop’s owl, making the night utterly its own.

There would be more birds inside. We stepped in.

Jackals woo-wooed, the sounds a net that snared us in delight. A Spotted owlet made a hoarse, drrr drr speech, enunciating perfectly civilised conversation. As the rain lessened, the insects began their symphony, and at once we were in the landscape of the 1990s, when the sounds of the night were full and rounded, more than truck horns and wedding parties. A ground beetle, armed with formic acid, scuttled over the ground under a papdi tree. And just over someone’s shoulder, between the amaltas, I sighted something tenderly making its way through the dark. It was just such a soft suggestion, it was almost not there. A slow blink, the yellow wink of a firefly. As I trained my eyes through the dark, I saw another, and then one more, until all the damp, dripping trees were full of fireflies, as abundant as the imagination of a child.

This was the landscape of the past emerging into the present like a palimpsest, a feeling that no time had passed at all. As we walked, our things in dry bags, our bodies dripping, we rediscovered an abandon that staying indoors just cannot provide.

I went back to Sanjay Van many times after, in the day and the night, spotting jackals, mushrooms and trees, spending time in quiet groves where coltish nilgai quietly drank water and common hawk cuckoos spilt the air with their “brainfever, brainfever” cries. As always, dead bodies turned up in this beleaguered forest. As always, the animals endured loud noises from fashionable eateries nearby. As always, there were plans to “develop” the forest and lash it with buildings, as always the Aravalli’s rocks stood witness to garbled plans, and the forest sense-scape came most alive at night. The forest talks to us throughout the day, but it is most audible at night, when we have quietened.

*****

I know what I heard this January night was jackals, from the Southern ridge, not far from me. Perhaps the animals left their old haunts to nose through rubbish closer to homes, or were chased by something and came out on the roads.

There is a parallel city, an ecological city, just beneath the top layer of our concrete-based civilisation. As we tuck into bed each night, may cities also afford dignity and privacy to its animal citizens, to its forgotten fireflies and its paired jackals, to a botanical imagination that reveals secrets each time we look, towards a relief from the burdens of human life.

Neha Sinha’s new book Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi (HarperCollins India) is just out. This piece expands on the themes of urban wilderness that she explores in the book.