The forest behind Tara’s village had a name: Kaccha Bagh. Nobody knew how old it was. Grandma said her grandmother played there, and before that, tigers did. 

Tara’s school planned a picnic to Kaccha Bagh. The city kids in her class complained. “It’s just trees. The zoo is better. At least animals are in cages.” The science teacher, Mr. Das, only smiled. “Bring a notebook. Write every living thing you see.”

The bus dropped them at the edge. No gate, no ticket counter. Just a narrow trail and the sound of cicadas so loud it felt like the air was buzzing. 

“One, two, three,” Ravi started counting trees. He stopped at twelve. “They all look the same.” 

Tara crouched near a rotting log. Ants carried white eggs. A beetle with a blue back pushed past them. Under the bark, something orange and many-legged vanished. She wrote: _Ants. Shiny beetle. Orange thing with too many legs._ 

Mr. Das pointed up. “Langurs.” Five of them, jumping between sal trees. One baby clung to its mother. Below, a pond reflected the sky. Dragonflies skimmed the water. Tadpoles wriggled in the shallows. A kingfisher dropped like a blue stone and came up with silver. 

“Ma’am, there’s nothing here,” complained Meera, swatting mosquitoes. 

“Nothing?” Mr. Das plucked a leaf. “This is a sal leaf. The langur eats it. The caterpillar eats it. The bird eats the caterpillar. The snake eats the bird. If I pull this one leaf out, what happens?”

A boy from the city, Aman, stepped on a mushroom. It puffed brown dust. He sneezed. “Eww. Fungus.” 

“That fungus,” Mr. Das said, “is breaking dead wood into soil. No fungus, no soil. No soil, no sal tree. No sal tree, no langur. No langur...” He didn’t finish. 

Tara walked ahead. The trail split around a giant anthill, red and tall as her. Vines strangled a dead trunk, but flowers grew from the vines. Bees worked the flowers. A spider web between two branches held a trapped fly, and a small yellow bird was pulling the fly free to feed its chick. She wrote faster. _Bees. Spider. Yellow bird. Vines that kill and feed._ 

At noon they sat on rocks to eat. Ravi unwrapped his chips and a monkey dropped down, snatched the packet, and vanished. Everyone laughed. The monkey sat high up, licked the salt, then threw the empty packet down. It landed near a hole. A crab crawled out, dragged the plastic inside. 

“Even the crab doesn’t want it,” Priya said. 

Mr. Das didn’t scold. He just picked up the packet with a stick and put it in his bag. “In the zoo, one tiger means you lose one tiger if it dies. Here, if the bee dies, the flower dies. If the flower dies, the bee dies. If the frog dies, mosquitoes win. If the mosquito wins, we get sick. Everything is someone’s lunch and someone’s neighbor.”

On the walk back, Tara counted her notebook pages. Sixteen. She hadn’t even left the main trail. _Mahua tree. Weaver ants. Bark gecko. Two types of butterflies. Something that looked like a leaf but jumped._ 

Six months later, yellow posters appeared in the village. _New Highway Approved. 4-Lane Road Through Kaccha Bagh. Progress for All._ Men with machines came to mark trees with red paint. 

Tara ran to Mr. Das. He was already there with her notebook. And Ravi’s. And Meera’s. And twenty others. They laid the notebooks open on the ground in front of the men. Pages of names, drawings, pressed leaves, a dead dragonfly wing taped to paper. 

The man in the helmet said, “It’s just jungle.” 

Mr. Das pointed to the anthill. “That’s engineers. To the pond. That’s our water filter. To the bees. That’s the farm’s help. Cut the sal, you cut the langur. Cut the langur, you cut the seed spreaders. No seeds, no forest. No forest, no rain. No rain, no rice.” 

The machines didn’t stop that day. But the photo of children sitting with notebooks around a red-marked tree reached the city newspaper. People from three villages came. The college students came. They didn’t tie themselves to trees. They just counted. Out loud. Birds. Insects. Trees. Frogs. Every time a machine started, the counting got louder. 

The highway moved. It took a longer route, around Kaccha Bagh. It cost more money, the news said. 

Tara went back a year later. The red marks had faded. The anthill was taller. In her notebook, on page seventeen, she wrote: _Same bee. New flower._