For me, discovering the Roee was like parting the curtains and seeing something magically beautiful in a landscape that was routinely dismissed as useless and a wasteland.
If someone asked you if there’s an image of the Thar Desert you carry around in your head, chances are it would be something like this.
Rolling dunes, forbidding wastes. Rajasthan tourism conspires with the idea that this is ‘Maru-sthal’ – the land of death. It sounds dangerous and romantic.
For 16 years, starting in 2006, I spent a few weeks every year travelling in the Thar, collecting seeds and getting to know the desert. My favourite discovery was a landscape that’s little known but whose name deserves to be pulled into common parlance.
Because it’s there – fragmented and threatened, but still clinging on. Beautiful. And apt. Local folks call it ‘Roee’. Low thickets of woody undershrubs and wiry grasses that are the natural jungle of the desert. I’ll introduce you by showing you the leading edge of a Roee.
