We have been climbing steadily for the last hour when we hear voices. The steep trails zigzagging up the deodar forests on the mountain slopes have been solitary so far, and Binto and I both stop, surprised.
We must look an unlikely pair. Binto, our short, rosy-cheeked, caretaker’s wife wears a pink salwar kameez with a green scarf on her head. A full head taller than her, I am wearing black trousers and a red windcheater, looking like the city girl I am. But it is lockdown time, I am marooned in the sprawling ancestral house my grandfather built here on the mountainside in Manali, and all the old rules are topsy turvy.
“Let’s go to the forest to look for lingri,” Binto had proposed a few days ago. She is bored. No visitors. The Hadimba Devi temple festival, when the drums beat all morning and peddlers set up shop, and tourists line up to take photos with rabbits and ride on yaks, hasn’t happened this year. There’s only her husband, the caretaker Ramesh, who spends his day sitting in the sun. And my two teenagers and I. “We’ll make a picnic of it,” she says. “Carry a stove, packets of Maggi, and cook it on the hillside. There are beautiful pastures there,” she says, trying to tempt the teenagers to come along.
Intrepid duo
The teenagers nod absent-mindedly, disarmed by her child-like enthusiasm, even though they are busy feeding cows and making butter on their gaming app. But in the morning, they are fast asleep under their quilts, having spent most of the night talking to friends in the far-flung geographies of Chicago, Pennsylvania, Delhi and Mumbai.
So it is a depleted duo, Binto and I, on the mountainside. Our bags are a quarter full of lingri, the fiddlehead ferns with tightly coiled tips that look like the bow of a fiddle. Lingri tastes delicious with a slight nutty flavour. It can be sautéed, curried and is often pickled to eat in the long, hard, frozen winter months. Grown in various part of the world, including Russia and Northeast America, the ferns even make their brief seasonal appearance at fancy supermarkets. In India, they are popular in Assam and in Kashmir and, of course, here in Himachal Pradesh.
Meanwhile, the voices on the slope above us continue and we hear the sound of splintering wood. “Poachers,” says Binto, motioning me to be quiet. “You wait here. It’s got to be someone from the village chopping wood. I am going to surprise him, scare him with a threat of the Forest Department’s ₹50,000 fine.”
Binto derives child-like pleasure from sneaking up on people, and this seems the perfect prank. Soon after, I hear her Pahari lilt raised in interrogation.
Ahead is a group of three men, presumably the poachers. Instead they turn out to be Forest Department workers planting saplings of deodar cedar and khnor horse chestnut, and cutting old wood to build fencing that will protect the baby plants.
Lurking dangers
We leave the forestry fellows behind and climb further, stopping at the next pasture. This one is full of ferns and Binto shows me how to distinguish good lingri from its poisonous cousins that cluster close. The lingri look a little like asparagus. Each fern is ringed with many microscopic hairs. They can make you sick, says Binto, we must be careful to wash the ferns really well before we cook them.
By now, our bags are bulging and we sit down for a bit to catch our breath. “I used to go alone into the forest,” Binto tells me. “But then a boy in Kullu, 50 miles away, went alone into the forest and didn’t return home. A leopard ate him. He was found dead with one hand and one leg missing,” she says. I look around. The hillside is silent, just the cawing of crows and the chirping of other birds. Yes, the pandemic may have upset the man-animal balance. But a leopard here? No, I tell myself. Binto tells tall tales. The path downhill is steep and full of stones and soon I am huffing and puffing and hungrily dreaming of steamed rice and lingri curry.
“Almost there,” says Binto, in the usual Pahari fashion where ‘almost there’ can mean anything from a few metres to many miles. But as a grey stone wall with a wooden board appears, I realise we have reached the end of the forest. Looking back, I read the board: ‘Thank you for visiting Manali Wildlife Sanctuary. Come again.’
Oh no, I think, that was really a walk in the wild; that leopard conversation wasn’t so fanciful after all.
The writer is the author of Career Rules: How to Choose Right & Get the Life You Want and founder of the Juhu Book Club.
