In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry"
In Kharagpur, Sankar Jayaram was our wildlife expert. His brother used to work in Africa and after every summer vacation he would come back and tell us wonderful stories about Masai Mara and what not. He also brought back a bottle of Chivas Regal -- despite being a strict teetotaler -- but that’s neither here nor there for the purpose of these stories.
Jayaram was a well connected guy and he had a brother-in-law or some other relative who was a bigshot in Bihar. One summer, when we were all getting bored at home, he suddenly brought up the idea of going to see tigers in the Saranda forest of Bihar (now Jharkhand). This was an all-of-a-sudden decision taken in the middle of one of those summer vacations when none of us had gone for any summer training. Jayram, Madu / Maheshwari and I started off from Howrah, or perhaps it was from Kharagpur. First, we met up with Kinshuk Adhikary -- who was also getting cooked in the summer heat at his home in Rourkela -- at a remote railway station called Rajkharsawan and then we proceeded to Barbil. Here we met Jayaram's contact and he helped us get a jeep to go deep into the Saranda Forest. This was a gigantic forest densely packed with very large saal trees.
Initially, we put up at a Forest Department bungalow and went to see a truly gigantic saal tree, affectionately referred to as the Queen of Saranda. We also saw some sambar deer, chital deer and even bison or gaur but nothing exciting like an elephant, let alone a tiger or leopard. Our bungalow chowkidar told us that there was a tree top 'macha' nearby and if we spent a night there, we might just get an actual visual on a tiger. So we decided to go.
But tough luck. Since there were so many mosquitos and we were scared of malaria we had applied anti-mosquito cream. We were also carrying a bottle of cheap, or rather inexpensive, student-grade whisky, possibly Diplomat or Aristocrat. Put together, these two things created such a smell that, let alone mosquitos, even tigers would have fled. What made matters worse was that other than Jayram, the three of us -- after polishing off a bottle of whisky -- promptly fell asleep and started snoring as well. So net-net, no tigers, no nothing.
But all said and done, this was a nice trip that spiced up and otherwise extremely boring summer. But the desire to see a tiger was still unfulfilled.
Soon enough, Jayaram came back with the information that there existed an organisation called the World Wildlife Federation and they were planning a trip to the Kanha National Forest which was home to many tigers. If we joined the federation as student members we too could go along with them. Sure enough, Jayram and I signed up immediately and this time we were accompanied by Ananda Mitra.
That winter, the three of us along with another twenty odd members of the organisation boarded the Gitanjali Express that dropped us off at Gondia the next morning. Then we took a rather rickety bus and reached the national park. The forest in Kanha was not as dense as the saal forest of Saranda. There were large areas of tall grass where one could see deer and bison but in certain places there were a lot of trees as well.
Ours was a pretty well organised expedition and the forest rangers arranged things quite smartly. First, we toured the jungle, the grasslands area, in open jeeps and saw deer and bison aplenty. We were wondering whether we will miss the tigers again but word came, through the radio, that a tiger was nearby. Our jeep now entered the more densely forested parts of the reserve and then stopped. We now had to leave the road which we did on the back of a trained and docile elephant. This elephant now plunged deep into the forest and took us very close to where the tiger was resting. The rangers keep track of the tigers and alert each other on radio. They also know whether it has fed well because a hungry tiger keep moving. On the other hand, if the tiger has fed well, it will rest and is unlikely to move away. Which is what happened and so we finally managed to see a magnificent animal -- far bigger than what we had seen in any zoo, and we were indeed delighted. It was sitting at ease in the bushes, a picture of majesty, ignoring the gaggle of wide eyed admirers who were peering at him, or her, from the back of an elephant. I had taken a nice black and white picture, but alas that is lost.
Back in the camp we exchanged stories and also had a taste of the wonderful mahua liquor, except that in our tipsiness, we failed to notice that there was a dead mouse inside one of the bottles! This caused quite a consternation but none of us died so all is well that ends well.
Except that our trip was not yet over and the best -- or whatever -- was yet to come.
Next morning, with the main tiger sighting behind us, we made one more, rather perfunctory, trip around the jungle but after lunch we were free and footloose. We had seen tigers no doubt but had done so from a distance and from the safety of an elephant back. What if we could walk through the jungle and see these majestic animals at close quarters! In hindsight, this was a maniacal, if not suicidal thought, but then when you are young, you do not really think through the consequences.
Even though we had been strictly warned about not leaving the camp without proper escort, the three of us crept out of the camp and followed a trail on which we had seen tiger pug marks the day before. We had no idea where the trail went but we followed it for quite some time through the dense forest. Now that we were on foot, we noticed that quite a few trees had claw marks. Pug marks on the ground and claw marks on the trees made us feel that we were indeed in HIS territory. Finally, we reached a small clearing. Here, the trees were few and far in between and there was nearly dry river bed passing through the middle. We somehow felt that this would be good place to see tigers who might come to drink water and sat down on the edge looking out across the river.
After sitting for a while, we heard the excited chatter of birds and monkeys in the trees lining the other bank. We also thought that we saw some movement in the bushes. Jayaram, our wildlife expert told us that there must be some kind of large mammal in the forest and we should keep our eyes peeled. The chattering continued for a nearly fifteen minutes while we peered intently at the bushes and then suddenly there was utter silence. It was as someone had switched off the speakers at a musical event and there was a complete and total silence in the area. There must be a tiger in the vicinity.
Indeed there was a tiger, except that it was not on the other bank that we had been looking at, but on our side of the river, right behind us.
Ananda and I were sitting on the ground but Jayram had got up to see better. Incidentally or fortuitously, he had turned back and was the first to spot the tiger. It had emerged from the line of trees behind us and was staring at us. Jayram tried to alert us, but as he told us later, he realised that he could not speak. He had lost his voice. He desperately tried to signal with his hands and eventually, I felt a pull on my shoulder. Then, and only then, did I too turn around to see an amazing sight.
Right in front of us, barely fifty to sixty metres away was a majestic tiger looking straight at us. That is when we realised what it really means to look a tiger in the eye -- because instantly we were paralysed by fear. The tiger stared at us for about a minute but it had no malice towards us. Perhaps it was neither hungry nor was it startled or afraid. It looked at us as visitors in his domain and not worthy of any further interest. So it turned its back on us, perhaps wagged its tail to swat away a fly and coolly and calmly walked back in the jungle.
I suppose we had stopped breathing but after His Majesty had disappeared, we regained our senses. We could barely talk and then as the reality sank in, we realised what fear means. Raw, unadulterated fear. A sense of intense helplessness, a cold chill if you may, flowed up from our stiff legs, through our stomach, past our heart and into our head. By this time, the sun had gone down and we realised that we would have to actually W A L K back through the jungle to reach the safety of the camp and there was a tiger in the area.
The enormity of the situation hit us like a lethal punch in the stomach. We had been told that even casual slap from a tiger -- let alone a actual attack -- is enough to crush our chest and cause instant death. All these stories that we had heard last night, came back to haunt us and the net result was that we were utterly paralysed. We locked our hands around each other's back hoping -- foolishly of course -- that this will give us some safety, but the terror simply would not go away. Words like bone-chilling and blood-curdling, that are often used to describe fear, are actually inadequate to express the feeling of terror that we experienced.. It was as if the Dementors in Harry Potter's Azkaban had sucked out all our courage and dare-devilry leaving us as pale, helpless ghosts of ourselves!
Finally we decided that standing there will not help us. Nor would anyone come to save us because no one would have known where we had gone. So with leaden legs that we could barely move and still clutching each other tight, we started the long and fearful journey back to the camp.
When we had come, it had been bright and sunny but now it was dark. In the feeble light of the moon and the stars we slowly managed to walk what was perhaps the longest walk in our life until eventually we saw the lights of the camp and finally ran towards it.
That evening the camp commander and our team leader gave us a massive tongue lashing for taking such risks and I realised that more than seeing a tiger, I had seen the face of raw terror. I had come face to face with fear -- cold, silent, and absolute. And in that moment, I finally understood Blake’s ‘fearful symmetry.’ As Alistair MacLean once wrote, Fear is the Key and in this case, it unlocked the fierce majesty of the tiger.
