OUT OF EDEN WALK

Fly over India’s lush Punjab, a region historically known as “the land of five rivers,” and from your bird’s eye view you’ll see that today—as a result of partition, in 1947—it is the land of three rivers: the Beas to the north, the Sutlej to the south, and the Ravi. The other two branches lie across Pakistan’s border. Where the Beas and Sutlej meet in India shines a large, artificial body of water called Hari-ke Pattan.

Sheltered by a border of thick brush, this wetland reserve extends over 15 square miles, its waters placid save for the sluggish drifting of hyacinth on the surface. Hari-ke Pattan owes its existence to the damming of the Sutlej. After India constructed a barrage across the river in 1953 to help irrigate the Punjab, the waters swelled to form the country’s second largest wetland, after Vembanad to the south. They spread to the edge of the thirsty village of Harike, whose people—and many others in the region—welcomed a new source of irrigation for their crops.

The wetland also created a life-preserving habitat for wildlife. It shelters jungle cats, mongooses, wild boars, and jackals, along with fish and rare birds such as the Indian skimmer and black-bellied tern. And it's home to the elusive Indus River dolphin, now almost extinct in India.

With time, however, life-sustaining Hari-ke Pattan would prove to be a troubled oasis.

This spring I joined the Out of Eden Walk for a few days. Project founder Paul Salopek, his walking partner Arati Kumar Rao, and I had set Hari-ke Pattan as our destination after a long day on the trail. In Harike village we met white-bearded Malki Singh, a veteran wildlife guide who has worked in the reserve since 1988.

Malki said that the reserve—recognized in 1990 as of international importance by the Ramsar Convention, a multi-nation cooperative body dedicated to preserving the world’s wetlands—has brought attention to his previously overlooked village, in the form of media coverage and some tourism dollars. “Because it’s now a bird sanctuary, it’s come on the wildlife radar,” he said as he showed us around. “It puts the little village on the map.”

But, he added, even after 50 years, people in Harike are largely uneducated about wildlife and conserving animals. Gharials, a critically endangered crocodile, used to lurk in the Beas River, but they went extinct locally in the 1980s after villagers killed them off. In recent months 47 gharials have been reintroduced, in batches, upstream from Harike. The government and wildlife conservation groups hope they’ll repopulate the river, but last December local farmers, unaware that gharials eat fish, not livestock, protested their release. Protest alone does no harm, but after what befell the gharials before, that reaction seemed an ominous sign.

A few miles from Harike, just outside the reserve, wheat farmer Hardayal Singh, 68, shook his head skeptically. “It’s a wild place,” he said. For two decades Hardayal has served as the sarpanch, or headman, of the farming village of Kot Qaim Khan, a dusty collection of barns and homes in the shadow of a cluster of trees. Its 40 to 50 families live alongside Hari-ke Pattan—in his case the boundary fence lies barely 35 feet from his house—which has reshaped their lives.

Amid the sarkanda reeds and bulrushes, jackals and jungle cats lurk, and wild boar often devour villagers’ crops of wheat and rice. They just frighten them off, Hardayal said. “If we were to kill them,” he said, gesturing to Malki, “this guy would put a chalan on me.” A chalan is a fine.

He laughed a touch ruefully, adding that it’s a crime to kill wild animals.

For many in these villages, Malki told us, old resentments over broken promises still simmer.

Back in the 1950s, when the reserve was established, the local government pledged to pay families to cede their land. But only a few received the promised compensation. Nor did villagers benefit from the infrastructural improvements they’d been led to expect. “They had a lot of dreams,” Malki said. “They thought there would be a bus stand, they thought there would be a college. But nothing came to Harike.”

Visions of the wetland ushering in an economic boost through lucrative tourism never materialized. Instead the people of Harike were left without so much as a hospital. Abruptly barred from fishing, cutting reeds, and harvesting sugarcane in the reserve, their livelihoods dwindled.

Hardayal Singh said that on paper he has 18 acres to his name, but in 1984 the sanctuary gobbled up seven or eight of them. He motioned to the land behind the fence. The reduction of his workable acreage, he said, amounts to about $25,000 a year in lost income. Hardayal’s family can barely coax enough from his plot to feed themselves and provide shelter.

Animatedly recounting his story, Hardayal laughed often at the harsh irony of Hari-ke Pattan’s failed promise of prosperity. He interrupted himself often too, to offer us chai, to introduce his son, to turn to Malki and share a joke.

If setting aside the wetland has made life difficult for some, Hari-ke Pattan itself is now under siege, choking under invasion of hyacinth; it shrank by half between 1995 and 2017 because of soil erosion and siltation. If the shrinkage continues, it’s possible that the wetland could disappear altogether. What, then, would life be like for the villagers of Harike and Kot Qaim Khan?

I asked the sarpanch if he wishes his family had been born somewhere else.

“No. I don’t think that way,” he said. “Keep chanting the name of the Lord. Do good to ten people, distribute your food and eat, do not do bad by anybody. And do not take anybody’s share of anything.”

Andrea Vale manages the Out of Eden Walk Translation Community, overseeing the translation and review process. Follow her on Twitter @AndreaLVale