A renowned scholar’s provocation, “the forest is an infrastructure to hold wetness,” had gripped our minds. We wondered during initial wanderings, “What should we observe if it indeed was one? And how should we draw the trees, leaves, muds, pebbles, boulders etc. whose surfaces seemed to fold on to one another to hold monsoonal waters?” We were literally and metaphorically lost in the forest until we met the grandmother. She insistently corrected us on numerous occasions, “What you call a forest is our baug (garden/orchard)!” Subsequently, the dense foliage opened differently to our eyes. On one such walk, a narrow mud path lined by lemon, star fruit, banana, papaya, guava, custard apple, mulberry, Bengal currant, Java plum, gooseberry, mango, jackfruit, cashew, toddy palm, coconut and tamarind trees led us to a shaded backyard. Here brinjal, chilly, curry leaf, cucumber, lady finger, tomato occupied small, protected saree or plastic sheet fences alongside jasmine, hibiscus, crossandra, marigold, rose, basil, periwinkle, adusa, cotton plant, Sewari, Giloy, Nigda. Nonchalantly we asked a few women chit-chatting in the shade of their backyard, “Who takes care of this garden?” Gazing back suspiciously, one of them replied, “We women do. We have planted all these. The ones much further” from the pada “grow on their own but we,” the adivasi clans that live here, “take care of them.”