As Long as It Lives

It was 1979, in the state of Assam, in India.

In the middle of the Brahmaputra, near Jorhat, lay a sandbar. The floods had just passed. Then the heat came.

A teenager from the Mising people was walking there. His name was Jadav Payeng.

On the sand, he saw snakes. Many snakes. Dead.

There was not a single tree to shelter them. The heat had killed them. "It was carnage," he would say later.

That day, a thought took hold of him:

"I thought even we humans will have to die this way in the heat."

He asked for advice. He was told nothing would grow on that sand. That he should try bamboo instead.

So he planted bamboo.

The next year, a planting project began on the sandbar. Jadav Payeng worked on it as a labourer. After three years, the project was abandoned. The workers left.

He stayed.

Above each young plant, he built a small bamboo platform. On it he placed earthen pots pierced with tiny holes. The water fell drop by drop, day after day.

To change the soil, he brought red ants from his village. They stung him many times.

He planted more. And more.

The sand became a forest. About 550 hectares.

The animals came back. Deer, by the hundreds. Rhinos. Bengal tigers. A herd of about a hundred elephants began passing through, and at least ten calves have been born there.

"After 12 years, we have seen vultures," he said.

For nearly thirty years, hardly anyone knew.

In the autumn of 2007, a photographer, Jitu Kalita, hired a boat on the river. He found the forest. "I couldn't believe my eyes," he said.

Not everything was easy. In 2008, the elephants damaged houses in the nearby village. Some people wanted to cut the forest down. Jadav Payeng dared them to kill him first.

Then he did something else. He planted banana trees, which elephants love. With enough to eat in the forest, they stopped coming out to the villages.

In 2012, a university in New Delhi named him "the Forest Man of India." On April 8, 2015, the President of India presented him with the Padma Shri, one of the country's highest honours.

He still lived simply, in a hut, with his wife Binita and their three children, on the milk from his cattle.

In 2017, at 58, he still rose before dawn nearly every day and crossed the river to reach his trees.

He put it in a few words:

Ubuntu says we become people through others. Jadav Payeng widened the circle: to the snakes, to the trees, to the elephants. His life and the forest's life hold each other by the hand.

It had all begun with dead snakes on burning sand.

Today, in the same place, there is shade.