Sheel, an urban ecologist, spends hours observing trees of all types in all seasons. She often travels by car for her own safety, worries about the impact of her work on her family, and has clear guidance for her female interns when they are, inevitably, approached: don’t engage, don’t respond.

“It’s the men who ask such intrusive questions: Who are you? Where are you from? What does your father do?” she says.

Sheel was recounting these experiences atop Delhi’s oldest fort inside Sanjay Van, a sprawling city forest overlooking a 12th-century minaret. She was one of about 20 women who had gathered on a crisp Sunday morning in October to enjoy nature, safely. Many had never experienced a forest before.

Among the group were a scientist who had stopped birding since she moved to Delhi, a psychiatrist who can’t find a safe place to run, and an environmental planner who cycles everywhere. For many women, simple pleasures such as enjoying nature have become beset by gender crimes.

“The city feels designed to crush any form of freedom, any form of exploration,” says Neha Sinha, who organised the walk. Author of My Wild City: Finding Nature, Meaning, and Hope in India’s Capital, Sinha has been organising these walks for two years.

During her own walks around the city’s forts, forests and wetlands to observe the diminishing number of fireflies, flying foxes, howling jackals, leopards and hyenas, civets and owls, and groves of 350-year-old trees, she has faced the wrath of men. She has changed her route countless times to mislead stalkers, and been asked by men on the street how much she would charge for sex.

“As has everybody else,” she says. “Nearly every woman I know has called a cop saying ‘I have a stalker.’ In a culture that tells you not to go out … how do you make nature your own?”

Two weeks before the women gathered on the walking trails of Sanjay Van, dotted with ruellias, vajradantis and jaal trees, hundreds of people had joined a protest in Delhi over the gang-rape of a 17-year-old in a public park.

Their demand was to make public spaces safer for women. The government’s response was to ban entry to public parks after sunset.

For Alankrita Narayan, a wildlife conservation student who often needs to work alone at night, that rule was unhelpful. During an internship, she recalls, her organisation trained her for worst-case scenarios in the jungle: What if something happens to your partner? What if you encounter a man carrying a weapon? What if you encounter a forest officer asking for sexual favours?