In the book The man who planted the trees of Jean Gion, the unfortunate widowed pastor Elzéard Bouffier of French Provence, whose only son died young, decides to flee civilization and sow trees in solitude, thinking that his homeland is dying for lack of trees. Every day he will sow a hundred acorns or seeds, knowing that only one in ten will germinate, but for forty consecutive years. Gion tells of the desert he met in these places and the forest he found a few years later, when he returned from the battles of World War I: the dried site was filled with trees, springs and streams, birds of all kinds and other hunting grounds.

Then, the reader is desperate to know that Elzéard Bouffier has not been a pastor, that Jean Giono created him in fiction and that we would never see the forests sown in Provence. The story of Forest Man from India comes to those of us who believe that the parables are really fascinating, even though we know they're beautiful, the truth is that the story of Forest Man from India is as simple as to awaken a ray of hope among the catastrophic news that we're being told this summer.

In 2007, Jitu Kalita, a natural topic journalist for Prantik magazine, in the Indian state of Assam, was engaged in photographing plants and animals from the Brahmaputra River, when a local grandfather told him there was a particularly beautiful forest on the island of Aruna. Kalita left the next day in the morning to meet the forest called Molai.

When he had been in the jungle for half a dozen kilometers, a colerized man approached him and yelled to allow him to leave. Following an unknown peasant to his house, Kalita will meet the protagonist of the story of his life: Jadav Molai Payeng, who has been able to create a new forest from his hand and without the help of anyone.

On the island of Majuli, on the Brahmaputra River, known today as the Molai Forest (in the language assam Mulai Kathon), Jadav Payenge has planted and cared for his hand for 38 years, to form a forest of 550 hectares. It has become famous because deforestation has first succeeded in drying up and disappearing over time on the doomed island, and again it has become a refuge for elephants, rhinos and tigers. Jitu Kalita made known in India and in 2014 Canadian director William Douglas McMaster presented the documentary “Forest Man” at the world’s film festivals.

Taming or Miris is the second largest ethnic country in Assam State in northeastern India. In 1979 he was hired by the Ministry of Agriculture to plant 200 hectares of forest on the large island of Majuli and in smaller areas. Nestled in the Brahmaputra River, Majuli is the largest freshwater island in the world. Although it still has about 150,000 inhabitants, today its territory is barely a quarter of what it did a hundred years ago, the rest has been dragged by erosion by Brahmapuh. The 1979 repopulation plans were to avoid it, but five years later the works were paralyzed with the depletion of money.

But Payenge, instead of going to the city for a job, decided to stay in the village and continue the cultivation. It has done so for almost forty years. Founded in 1958, in Sanctuary Asia magazine, Shailendra Yashwant explains that “he is a romantic and revolutionary dreamer without hope, like many others in the 1980s of Assam. But while most chose the armed revolutions of many classes, Payenge decided to plant trees of many kinds. [Revolution] They are gradually disappearing in the air, but the Payengen jungle is still standing, facing the annual floods of the Brahmaputra hard and incessant erosion.”

In the forests of the Brahmaputra valley

Along with his wife, Binita, and his sons, Sanjay, Sanjiv and Moonmooni, they raise 50 cows and buffalo in the village of Kokilamukh, where they graze in the forest around them. They continue to live in the eternal law of the people of Taming, using what is offered to them by the jungle on the shores of Brahmaputra, rebuilding what has dragged the floods each year. During all these years, he has risen early to deliver milky milk to the dairy that brings Jorhat to the capital. After breakfast, Jadav left his wife at home and sent her children to school to plant and sow new trees.

In the state of Assam, the Brahmaputra river overflows annually, but the heavy flooding that occurred in 1979 should have been particularly severe. The flooding and the drought that followed, Payenge, then very young, found them frightened and killed in the sand of the snake's streams. He asked the old people what he could do so that the snakes wouldn’t die (“if the snakes die, we will end up killing us”) and if the old people recommended planting the rods, a long herb able to conserve the land and the wet environment.

With its 50 cane roots planted, it continued to plant more and more non-stop, with no help from anyone. He soon realized that the bamboos performed a good service to restore these areas and began planting ever-more varied trees. This is how the Molai forest is born, which occupies a space similar to that of Lasarte-Oria.

The forest has attracted animals and also some new head breaker. In 2008, a group of elephants crossed Kokilamukh, again using the migratory route of thousands of years, as they did in their day. Payengi had been crushed by the old house, but just as it had taken with sportsmanship the return of nature, the inhabitants of the area became terribly angry to see that their fields were devastated: they tore down or burned one in ten trees he had kept for years. Fortunately, Payeng was already known in India; authorities that talk about ecology and sustainability also gave him rewards, and his colleagues managed to reassure the farmers in the area by paying compensation for the damage caused by elephants.

Payengi is now taken from the reservoirs that are being built in Subansiri, because it will change the ecosystems surrounding this branch of the Brahmapuche. But he continues to plant trees, now also thanks to the funds coming from all over the world with four companions: “Nature is nothing more than God himself, in another way. That's why I'll keep going. (...) If Gautam Buddha received the light in the shadow of a Banian tree, is it not our responsibility to take care of the rainforests? ".