Dawn in the Terai forest, on the edge of Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand. Sleep still pressing down on the eyelids; legs creaking and slow. Looming in the low light are giant eucalyptus trees, long peelings from their papery barks strewn on the forest floor. The sense of a dream enhanced by the kitchen-garden feel of copious shrubs of karipatta everywhere, and the eerie, echoing cries of peacocks. Now a dry riverbed, the ground underfoot giving way to a landscape of rounded stones polished into smoothness by flowing water. Across the river, another long expanse of eucalyptus trees and karipatta shrubs. And then another river bed, this one more sand than stone, flecked with leaves baked red by the summer sun.
Suddenly, the figure in front of me, a grizzled forest guide named Balam Singh, stops and points to a small trail of pugmarks in the terrain. As he turns, a look of sublime, almost drooling ecstasy lights up his face.
“The tiger was here… a few minutes before us,” he whispers. “Look, that’s where he climbed out of the river. The wind is blowing from behind us. So he has known for some time that we are coming after him. He’s running away from us. Let’s go after him!”
I felt my hair stand on end. True, I had come to Kumaon to walk—walk away all the accumulated weight and stress, the physical and digital grime of an entire year. I had seen tigers in the jungle on several occasions, mostly from a jeep and once from atop an elephant. But it was the combination of walking and tigers in the open forest that I wasn’t so sure about.
A safari jeep in the Durga Devi Zone of Jim Corbett National Park.
Surely it made sense to walk away from where the tiger, the most zealously territorial of beasts, loped and prowled? But Balam was already scrambling up the riverbank. I could either follow him or turn back home.
I followed.
For more than an hour, we twisted and turned through the jungle paths, our ears pricked up for the alarm calls of birds and animals fleeing, sifting the ground for pawprints of the big cat. Around us, the trees grew denser—tall, mature sal, perhaps 200 or more years old, the odd banyan with its broad canopy and drooping tendrils, old and dead trees with their trunks full of holes.
We knew the tiger was not far. At one point, we saw a herd of spotted deer rushing away from it. This was nothing like the cosseted hum of the safari, of beast versus machine; it was much more interesting and challenging, a game of hide-and-seek over tree-covered terrain with the elusive animal often considered the god of the forest. To know the tiger was near and to gauge its presence from cues as we plodded on foot was far more interesting than seeking it out with a pair of binoculars in a jeep.
We had to think and plot, stop and listen, wait and hide. I was watching, but perhaps being watched, too.
Slowly, I felt the fear and tension, the legends about maneaters, the sense of being exposed and vulnerable, leave my body. And Balam had done this hundreds of times in his life, armed only with a long stick. I was grateful for what he had given me. I fell into a wonderful reverie in that world of green and brown, in tune with the chirping of birds and the rustling of trees. I was able to look past the tiger into his world in the jungle. If only more walks in life could have the prospect of a tiger’s presence in them! By the time we returned to our hotel three hours later, it felt like my feet had taken me forward not just into the day and into the world, but also in my life.
“Balam is special to us, one of the few remaining exponents of a dying art—that of tracking a tiger on foot,” said Manoj Sharma, chief naturalist of Jim’s Jungle Retreat located at the edge of the national park. “There’s nothing he enjoys more than this. What you experienced this morning was closer to the method of Jim Corbett than to the hi-tech methods of the 21st century.”
Manoj Sharma, the property’s resident naturalist.
“Most people still come to the resort with the single goal of seeing a tiger. But here, our motto is, ‘Seek the tiger, find the jungle,’” Manoj added. “What you see and experience while walking and thinking on your feet in the forests will make you ask the right questions about how the world of the jungle sustains itself—the intricate web of relationships between animals and trees, birds and insects, land and climate that we all need to absorb if we are to protect our planet from ecological devastation.”
I thought of Manoj’s words often that week as I went further up the heights, havens and heavens of Kumaon, going from the sal trees of the lower reaches to the great expanses of pine much higher in the hills, ending around 6,000ft above sea level in the exquisite terrain of oak and rhododendron forests—one of the best patches of pure greenery in the country—at Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary around Mary Budden Estate.
Mary Budden Estate.
Every day, my generous and convivial hosts designed long walks for me, both treat and test. I knew that on these slopes, I was walking in the footsteps of some great predecessors. Corbett, whose name is still uttered with reverence everywhere in Kumaon as Gora Sadhu; Tagore, who, it is said, worked on his great poetic sequence Gitanjali while living in a small house (now desolate and in ruins) on a mountaintop near Gagar; and all the scores of humble, near-anonymous shepherds, pilgrims, traders, saints and sojourners of centuries past who had worked trails into these formidable mountain passes and left behind a feast of observation and lore about medicinal plants and trees, a tradition of love and reverence for the wonders of the natural world and the beauty and mystery of highlands more important to sustain today than any discourse about politics or economics.
I found I loved the mountain forest in its various shades and incarnations: the winding trails, the sound of cuckoos going (as local lore has it) “kaafal-paako!” after the tart, tasty local berry called the kaafal, the patterns of dappled sunlight filtering through branches and brooding shade, the sudden views of the distant snow-capped Himalayas on a clear morning—especially clear from my room on the top floor of Soulitude in the Himalayas—and the drifting clouds in the valley below me, the red sheets of rhododendron flowers on the forest floor.
But what I liked most about the forest was myself in it. The alertness and sudden spells of reverie, the feeling of being a slow-moving body in a timeless world, the reports of my eyes and legs. With each passing day in the greenery, I felt ever more at home in both myself and this world. So many memories, buried under the debris of urban life, came back to me. I came to think of walking in Kumaon as a route back into my own mind.
“The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking,” the nature writer Rebecca Solnit mused. “This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.”
I knew I might not be this happy again for years.
The exterior of Soulitude in the Himalayas a quirky property that is state of the art in its ecological awareness.
Although there’s definitely much that is timeless about Kumaon, one of India’s most beautiful regions, it is wracked by the same problems as the plains below: habitat degradation, climate change, pollution, a sprawling human footprint and a slow, backward creep for native species. This was why I appreciated not just the beauty of the properties I stayed at but also their commitment to sustainability.
Most of the food was locally sourced and all the more appetising not only because it is rare on an urban dining table, but also as it followed long, appetite-stoking treks. I especially remember lunch on the veranda of Dalar Village Homestay, a showpiece of Kumaoni cuisine: thick, nourishing rotis of madua ka atta topped with ghee and gur, bhat ke dubke made with local grains and millets, sarson ki sabji and malai lauki, followed by peaches and plums plucked straight from the trees surrounding the property. For a week, I didn’t see a single bottle of mineral water anywhere in the vicinity (all the properties serve RO water, often in beautiful copper bottles) and almost no plastic—no shower caps, no dispensers in the bathrooms, and most delightfully, large kachnar leaves folded into a soap dish at Jim’s Jungle Retreat.
“There is no waste in nature,” Manoj reminded me one afternoon while we were out on his famous ‘termite walk’, one that shows how the sal trees harbour termites beneath their barks as a way to expand their own footprint in the forests of the hills. “Waste is only part of human living patterns… and we can bring ourselves to change that.”
If anything, my trip became not just a romantic journey into the mountains and forests but a rigorous lesson in the science and politics of energy and conservation, in expanding my architectural and botanical imagination.
A Kumaoni thali served at the homestay.
At Soulitude by the Riverside—Manish Chandra’s exquisite, utterly secluded property by the bank of a glacial stream—it was one thing to spend an evening by the running water over the rocks, watching the light drop over the sheer, steepling cliff that abuts the retreat, and another to spend mornings in the vegetable garden (is there another place in India where we can pick pumpkins, aubergines and greens with such a splendid view?), deciding on my lunch in consultation with excited children, and then drinking coffee in the lounge flooded with natural light and—even in peak summer—a cool breeze.
“All of this is a result of the roshandaans, the little skylight-style windows on all sides of the room,” Manish said. “We were totally against installing air conditioners in such a remote location. Instead, we wanted it to be a place where we and the guests could both develop a new insight into the forms and forces of nature. With these simple little skylights, the breeze coming in from the nearby river starts a positive convection cycle, lifting the hot air inside the room and pushing it out.”
“We have eight acres here but only seven rooms,” he explained. “It runs against the conventional imagination of how to maximise a hotel property, but we wanted to leave the smallest possible footprint on the landscape.”
Further up, Mary Budden Estate is completely solar-powered, and the plumbing at the property is served by harvested rainwater—the low-set, hushed house is not a drain on its surroundings but is firmly in sync with them: a gateway into a wonderworld of hundreds of acres of beautiful forest. I explored this part of the region with the most charming and charismatic guide, the owner herself, Serena Chopra. Over two days of walking, we managed to give each other nicknames linked to our addresses in Delhi: “Jor Bagh Jay” and, because of my bright green Uniqlo jacket, “Kalkaji Caterpillar.”