Urban jungle | Neha Sinha's 'Wild Capital'
Conservation biologist Neha Sinha's Wild Capital is a passionate love letter to Delhi's natural environs
Endearingly personal and enchantingly wild, Wild Capital explores Delhi and its immediate outskirts for—well, for a lot else, but mostly—“unfettered, uncalculating, animal joy”. It is full of science and stories, curiosity and poetry, knowledge and love. Oropetium grasses and ornithophilous flowers sit comfortably with mahua blossoms that taste of “sunshine and honey made solid”. Or with the native Aravalli trees that remain small for years “seemingly bent in a complicated conversation with themselves”.
Endearingly personal and enchantingly wild, Wild Capital explores Delhi and its immediate outskirts for—well, for a lot else, but mostly—“unfettered, uncalculating, animal joy”. It is full of science and stories, curiosity and poetry, knowledge and love. Oropetium grasses and ornithophilous flowers sit comfortably with mahua blossoms that taste of “sunshine and honey made solid”. Or with the native Aravalli trees that remain small for years “seemingly bent in a complicated conversation with themselves”.
A conservation biologist, Neha Sinha is not just pursuing the lesser known but also helping us look with fresh and curious eyes at the quotidian. With her, and with the experts she accompanies, we explore city forests being domesticated into parks, the central Ridge, the Mangar Bani forest, biodiversity sites, the Yamuna and even the green spaces around heritage monuments. The book has tales of memory and loss but also of possibilities and trembling hope.
It is rich with exquisite attention being paid to tiny, not-yet-thought-of things: biological soil crust over rocks; strands of spider’s web that hold together a paradise flycatcher’s nest; grey hornbills’ eyelashes. There are owls and civets in Sanjay Van, fireflies in Hauz Khas, kites on semal trees, a plenitude of heart-shaped leaves in the Ridge, the scent of clean, uncorrupted soil in Mangar Bani. And the lyrical names of Aravalli Biodiversity Park’s native trees, unfamiliar to most of us: kullu, salai, kair, dhau, kareel.
This book is also a rewriting of animal and plant grammar into our thoughts, making parakeet a verb (“parakeeting through life” is facing life with a defiant squawk!) and rewilding metaphors (“as resilient as a kumat thorn”, “unbeatable as a dhau”). If you start opening yourself to nature, it’s okay to not have the authority of knowledge, it’s okay to think of a tree as perhaps-palash. “The name of this tree is my tree.”
Wild Capital is a diary, nature guide, manifesto and passionate love letter. My best review is that it made me start visiting the spaces it described that were new to me, armed with binoculars, inquisitiveness, wonder and hope.
