The Moon at Noon!

By

Jaya Ramanathan

The moon at noon...! This is no flight of poetic fancy on my part but a fascinating reality in the verdant forests of Madhya Pradesh. Where there is nothing between you and the azure sky with hills looming around like sentinels and the river sedately beating on the ragged shore, a little before lunch, you look up is that the sun, so incredibly benign? Then it dawns on you, it is indeed the noonday moon!

Our two-week memorable stay at some of the most untrammeled forests in Madhya Pradesh was made possible by good friends who are highly placed state officials, for many of these exotic forest rest houses are not even known, let alone available to the general tourist.

About 90 km from Bhopal is Madhai, a forest reserve on the Tawa backwaters with a rest house accessed by boat from the mainland. With just seven rooms, it is managed by a forest ranger, a forest guard and half a dozen helpers and wireless operators. The place is without electricity and cell phones fail to catch signals. The rooms are clean but spartan and the food is wholesome but basic. A couple of black bucks taken in as orphans roam close to our rooms, even eat off our hands, hundreds of other deer species can be seen at the riverfront and chimps gambol on tree tops shaking down fresh leaves and fruits for the herbivores below in an inexplicable show of symbiosis. All day long your auditory senses are treated to the chirping of birds and simian cackle while at night the nocturnal crickets and frogs takeover with occasional warning cries from the more vulnerable creatures. A gentle rhythm is provided by the lapping river and the rustle of the sal, peepul and teak. As the chill of the night envelopes the place, you sit around a bonfire and wonder, why do you ever live elsewhere?

The Satpura range which gives MP its magnificent forest range, arguably the single largest in the country covering 1500 sq km, received international attention and was declared a Biosphere Reserve in 1999. Today it comprises three segments, the teak forests of Bori, the sal and mixed forests of the Satpura Tiger Reserve and the Pachmarhi Sanctuary. We were fortunate enough to traverse through all three. This included a seven-hour drive through the heart of the forest in a Gypsy, from Madhai to Pachmarhi, a route open only to forest officials and vehicles. It was rough riding all the way, but the unpredictability of the jungle route was almost intoxicating. One moment we were passing through dense, canopied paths and the other through open grasslands with scarce vegetation. Our notional wealth in teak and sal comes as a most pleasant surprise. Wild boars, bison, peacocks, deer species, jackals, criss-crossed the way even as feral cattle scuttled away in imitative fear!

Pachmarhi, at about 3000 feet, is barely a hill station, but it is MPs only hill resort, a beautiful, unspoilt town atop a table mountain. With a small population, Pachmarhi has managed to retain its colonial flavour. The place affords a lot of trekking and historic sites for the more adventurous of the tourists.

On our way to the Seoni Tiger Forest Reserve from Pachmarhi, we stopped for one night at the Tamia rest house, another breathtaking location on a hill overlooking a lush green valley!

After a long drive of over five hours through roads, inhospitable to anything but a four-wheel drive, we arrived at the Pench forest for a three night stay at Kiplings Court. Yes, this is Kipling country all the way. While it is still debated whether or not the writer actually stayed at Pench, he has based his Jungle Book on this very forest and the place is sold on the ambience. The hotels façade is heavily painted with Mowgli hugging Bhaloo on one side and with Bhageera and Colonel Haathi on the other. There is the Mowgli resort within the forest and a dhaba of the same name.

Pench derives its name from the river that flows through the center of the reserve. In 1977, a 450-sq mile area was declared Pench Sanctuary, a smaller area within was designated Pench National Park. In 1992 GOI declared the entire area as the 19th Tiger Reserve of the country and the national park was renamed Indira Priyadarshini Pench National Park and the sanctuary came to be known as Mowgli Pench Sanctuary.

Back to Kipling. He is said to have borrowed heavily from Robert Armitage Strendales books Seonee, Mammalia of India and Ceylon and Denizens of the Jungle for the topography and wildlife in his book, and from Sir William Sleemans diary An Account of Wolves Nurturing Children in Their Dens which detailed a boy brought up by wolves and captured in Seoni district in 1831, for inspiration to draw his protagonist, Mowgli.

While there were several little Mowglis in Pench, scrawny little boys brought up in the wilds, we did not so much as get a glimpse of Sher Khan, or for that matter of Bhaloo or Bhageera, not even a Kaa uncoiled himself to beseech us to look into his eyes! and the only Col. Haathi was the tame pachyderm that gave tourists a ride on his ample back. Yet it was a most tranquil holiday, days of peaceful commune with the basics of life in virgin territory, not ruined by the exaggerated luxuries of modern living.

Content Source:

This article originally appeared in The Sunday Express.

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