Marubhoomi is the Sanskrit word for desert, and it means the Land of the Dead. A cursory glance at any desert would make you believe this is true. Vast stretches of undulating sand-dunes, dotted with tiny specks of lifeless green. And mirages that look like water, but not a drop to drink.
But look again, and you will find beetles looking for food, reptiles looking for beetles, and birds looking for reptiles. The cycle of life in perpetual motion.
Over millennia, the flora and fauna of this unforgiving landscape have adapted to survive on bare minimum food and precious little water.
Desert National Park situated 40 kms to the west of Jaisalmer is a veritable storehouse of Indian desert wildlife: over 40 species of reptiles and over 120 species of birds. Did someone just say it is the Land of the Dead?
The Park falls in the Great Indian Thar Desert, one of the harshest terrains in the world. A part of this desertscape spills over into the Rann of Kachchh in Gujarat, where the shifting sands transform into fixed flatlands encrusted with layers of salt.
In both these regions you will find shells that you find on the seashore, and the salvadora trees that you find in the mangroves. Proving beyond doubt that all this land was once submerged in the primordial sea, and was brought up during volcanic upheavals in the womb of Mother Earth.
The amazing Desert National Park starts at Sam Dunes and extends to all of 3,200 square kilometres. But the first impression of the Park is a big let-down. What was once a picturesque landscape of shifting sands at Sam has now been ruined by a shifting population of irresponsible tourists. The tragedy about this place is that the tourism department and the forest department of Rajasthan Government are at loggerheads with each other. And as they slug it out, mountains of plastic keep piling up in a rare and unique landscape that should have been declared a World Heritage Site a few decades ago.
In the forest, do as the denizens of the forest do. I observed that the wildlife of the area stayed away from this area infested with homo sapiens, and so did I. They had gone four kilometres ahead towards Pakistan and had turned left towards the Sudhasari Gate. So did I.
Just as we entered this area of the Park, we were rewarded by a rare sight: over a dozen white-backed vultures spread over a cluster of three trees. This number doubled in the evening as they flocked together for roosting in the night. A heartening sight because vultures of all species are disappearing at an alarming rate all over India. The forest guard Balveer Singh informed that this large scale decimation is due to a veterinary drug called Diclofenac that's used to treat cattle. This drug enters the body of vultures who feed on the carcasses of cattle, and that kills them instantly.
On the drive to the main gate, we spotted the Imperial Eagle and the equally royal Egyptian Vulture. At the gate, we were told by the excited forest guard Dharamdas that he had spotted a small group of the highly endangered grassland bird, the great Indian bustard. But after a kilometre-long ride through the open grassland when we reached the spot we discovered that the elusive bustards had once again eluded us. The first time I set out on such a journey was in a Bishnoi village in Rajasthan called Khari. There again, I had missed them by a feather.
A large herd of chinkaras looked at us from the distance with a glint in their eyes which I interpreted as, 'We know where they are, but we won't tell you.’
From Sudhasari, we proceeded to a little-known village called Khuri, 20 kms away. There we feasted our eyes on rippling sand-dunes still undiscovered by man. A couple of decades ago, this is how the sand-dunes of Sam looked: with pugmarks of wildlife criss-crossing the dunes rather than boot-marks of reckless revelers.
On our way back to the guest house, our car came to a screeching halt and I banged my head against the windscreen. When I asked Babloo Chawla, my driver, why he braked all of a sudden, he simply pointed to the road in front. And there I saw a beautiful red sand-boa snake, slowly crossing the road. We alighted and watched it glide into the bushes.
Babloo, in the three days he was with us, had become an excellent spotter of desert fauna. He said that it was the very first time he took people who would stop at every turn, and trail butterflies and birds and reptiles and mammals, armed with cameras and binoculars. His curiosity soon became an interest which soon turned into a passion. And he started spotting animals much faster than we could. The only danger was that he would take his eyes off the road ever so often!
The next day, we decided to drive down towards a village called Dhanana near the Pakistan border. If the pristine sand-dunes on the way to Khuri was a trailer, here was the feature film. All along the 40 km drive there were endless stretches of breathtaking sand-dunes interspersed with normal desertscapes. Here we spotted flocks of sandgrouse, a lone spiny-tailed lizard and the puny desert fox. It dawned on me that this fox would have been miniaturized by Nature just so that it had to fend only for its reduced size.
But the desert was showing signs of greening. The changing patterns of monsoon and increasing irrigation facilities were bringing in more water into this arid zone than ever before. Newer plants were making their way into the desert, and the fauna too were undergoing ecological changes. Will the artificial introduction of water be detrimental to the flora and fauna that have evolved over millennia to adapt to these harsh conditions? Only time will tell.
Because just as 'Water is Life’, these deserts have shown in an exemplary way that 'No Water is also Life’.
