As quietly as twelve bikes can go

The grove sits in a fold of hills between Mangar village and the Faridabad edge, and the road through it is single-lane, broken in places, dropping into the trees. We briefed it properly at the last stop: first or second gear, low revs, no horns, no stopping in the core, no music. It sounds precious written down. It is not, when you are actually in there — dhau trees older than the country whose flag we were nominally out to mark, birdcall you can hear over the engines because the engines are barely turning, a jackal that crossed ahead of the lead and was gone.

Everyone got it. Twelve bikes went through that forest about as gently as twelve bikes can, and came out the far side without anyone having touched a horn.

You do not clean inside the grove — you keep out of it. But the boundary, where the road meets the trees and where people pull over, is a different matter: bottles thrown from cars, chip packets, a shocking number of empty pan-masala sachets caught in the scrub, and the odd bag of picnic waste tipped straight over the edge.

We worked about 300 metres of the boundary on both sides of the road, staying on the tarmac side of the tree line. Around 12 kilos — light, because it is nearly all plastic film and sachets — bagged and carried out to the bins on the Mangar road. Small haul, but that stuff blows straight into a protected forest and stays for decades.

From the grove the loop runs on through the quiet Bandhwari and Dhauj lanes and back to the chai stall — the standard Aravalli backroads circuit. Home by late morning.

If you ride Mangar: go early and midweek if you can, keep it slow and silent, and do not ride into the core of the grove. The loop, the no-horn note and the leopard-belt caution are on the Aravalli Backroads page.