Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 5, Number 1. May 2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
Dangerous
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| Image courtesy: dreamstime.com |
While Dev lived, hundreds came to see him. In death,
however, he is unmourned, buried in a small column deep inside the newspaper.
Perhaps it is only a few of us, his nearest and dearest, who feel his death
like a kick in the guts. There are the inevitable regrets, the what-ifs. But these
are of no good anymore, not to us, nor to him. What we owe him, though, is that
his story be told.
And for that, I have to start at the beginning. To
understand a death, it is important understand the life that preceded it, for
one loses its meaning without the other.
Born
in a year of severe drought, Dev was braving the odds right from the time he
took his first breath. There was no food to be had. His mother had no option
but to leave them alone—Dev and his sister, both just a few months old—as she
foraged for food. With every passing day she had to go further and further
afield, venturing out of the safety of familiar surroundings, and yet the
pickings were meagre when she was lucky, non-existent when she was not.
One
day, the search for food and survival took her all the way to the outskirts of
a neighbouring village. Near-delirious with hunger and thirst, she lay down in
the tall grass for a moment of rest. And that’s when she heard him. A young
boy, all by himself. He was walking amidst the grass, parting it this way and
that with a wooden stick. As she watched him with growing interest, something
hitherto unknown stirred deep inside her. Guided by an instinct older than she,
she crept through the grass keeping low till she was almost upon him. The boy
turned. But before he could cry out, before he could even register her
presence, his throat was in her grip. But she had miscalculated. The boy was
not alone. His friends were close by and they raised a cry. The alerted villagers
in the adjoining fields gave chase, and she was surrounded before she could
reach the cover of the woods. There was only one fate a killer—a child-killer,
at that—could expect at the hands of the angry mob.
That
night, in the village, a family spent a sleepless night mourning their child.
And many miles away, Dev and his sister spent a sleepless, hungry night, too, not
knowing enough to mourn the death of their mother.
Their
mother had hidden them well and it was several days before we could trace them.
By then the sister was dead, but Dev, though famished and faint with
dehydration, still clung to life by the barest thread.
We
brought him in and nursed him through the first few touch-and-go days. At
first, all we could do was give him fluids intravenously to fight the
dehydration. When he had finally overcome his weakness enough to be able to
raise his head, we shifted to bottle-fed formula.
Little
by little, he regained his strength. Recovering from the trauma of separation
from his mother and sibling, though, took a whole lot longer. I stood by him
through each painful step he took towards normalcy. When he faltered or fell to
some infection or the other, I got him back to his feet. But finally, the day
came when he could declare without anxiety or reservation that he had made a
full recovery. By then, he was family. The closest thing to family I have
known.
The
young cub was friendly and playful, chasing after insects and butterflies and leaves
blowing in the wind, making me laugh with his childish antics. The endearing way
he had of cocking his head to one side, as he puzzled out some new discovery or
considered his next move, brought to mind the movie star Dev Anand. That’s
where he got his name. Yes, it was I who christened him Dev. And, like his
namesake, he knew to turn on the charm. He had all of us at the reserve wrapped
around his little finger. He learned fast how to make his wishes and demands
known to us, and it was all we could do not to give in to them—to not give him
his favourite snacks whenever he demanded them, to not cuddle him and play the
rough games he preferred. He was hard to resist, but if there was one thing we—I—had
decided right from the beginning, it was this: he would not grow up being soft,
spoiled, dependent. We loved him dearly, but we recognized that he belonged
neither with us, nor to us. We were a mere pit-stop in his life’s journey, and
it was our responsibility to ensure he made his own way in the world. His
world, not ours. Dev was a tiger, and he belonged in the jungle.
It’s
a controversial topic amongst conservationists and others whether a hand-reared
cub can be released into the wild. Some are of the opinion that such tigers
could be dangerous. Untrained in hunting, they are more likely to turn to
easier prey—humans. And given Dev’s history, what with his mother being labelled
a man-eater, it was bound to be all the more controversial. But I was
determined he would not spend his life in captivity. The very thought of him in
a zoo, gawked at by people from the other side of metal bars, made me shudder.
So, when
the time came, I personally accompanied him to a Forest Department-sponsored
rehabilitation program in the Western Ghats where wild animals could be reared
in a semi-wild environment. The rehabilitation centre was a huge fenced-off and
secure property. It came complete with grasslands and forested areas. And prey.
Dev would no longer be handed his meals on a tray, he would have to work for
them, hunting them down as he would in the wild. He wasn’t pleased at this turn
of events, not at first, anyway. His cocked head and large, expressive eyes
never failed to let me know what he thought of this whole enterprise. But
hunger is a strong motivator.
It was
not easy; not for him, nor for me. The occasions on which I had to steel my
heart when he returned from an unsuccessful hunt, tired and dejected, were
many. But, I will never forget the day he made his first kill. I watched from
afar and, for a minute, I almost could not believe that he had actually done it—downed
a fawn, all on his own! He seemed surprised himself, pawing and sniffing at the
carcass at his feet. When he triumphantly settled down to the hard-won feast, my
heart swelled the way a father’s would when his son hit his first six on the
cricket field.
After
those first toddling forays into independence, Dev made progress in leaps and
bounds. And eventually, he was deemed fit enough to be released into the reserve
that my team and I oversaw, the forest of his birth. When the cage opened, he
stepped out, a full-size majestic beast. He stood there for a while, sniffing
the air. What was it he smelled? Freedom? Did he recognize its sweet scent? We
kept well behind, not wanting to confuse him. He took one tentative step
forward, then another.
There
are no words that capture that particular tangle of joy and sorrow, pride and fear
that I felt when he entered the jungle and disappeared into its depths.
He
was radio-tagged and we kept a close watch on him in the initial months. But
Dev took to the jungle like a fish to water, laying all our doubts and fears to
rest. He put his skills to good use, and he flourished.
Yes,
we had taught him well. We had taught him everything, in fact, except one
critical thing—one crucial aspect of survival in the jungle. It wasn’t
something we could teach him because it was something he had not to learn, but to
unlearn. How could we, who had bottle-fed
and loved and cared for him, teach him that humans, more than anything else he would
ever encounter in the jungle, are to be feared? Instead of avoiding humans like
the plague, he, guided by past experience and curiosity, practically courted
them.
The
safaris at the reserve became hugely popular. Whereas, at most forest reserves,
visitors would have to contend with a few pug marks on the track, at most a
fleeting glimpse of black-striped orange if they were lucky, here tiger
sightings were the norm. Dev did not avoid the paths the safari jeeps took. He
was often seen walking nonchalantly along them. Even when he saw the jeeps, he
made no move to disappear into the undergrowth. He lay where he was, sometimes
even coming up to within a few feet of the jeeps, curiously studying the enthralled
tourists with a cocked head.
“Our
very own Dev Anand,” the tour guide would quip, “Ever ready to pose. Now is the
time to get those cameras out, folks.”
And
they did. They clicked furiously, shot after shot. Dev from the front, Dev in
profile, Dev lying down, Dev getting to his feet, Dev walking away. His pictures began appearing with clockwork
regularity on social media. And we were happy. The publicity was good for the
park. And Dev could potentially become a poster child for tiger rehabilitation.
We
never guessed at the dangers. We had been trained to watch out for snares and
traps—the physical manifestations of danger. Who knew something as diaphanous
as the internet could pose a threat, that bits and bytes can be as dangerous as
bullets and traps? We, who were constantly on the lookout for gun-toting
poachers, completely overlooked the danger posed by camera-wielding tourists.
Right
under our noses, their smartphones captured photos of Dev and sent them off
into cyberspace, geo-tagged with the coordinates of his location.
Dev,
like any other tiger, rarely ventured outside the territory he had carved out
for himself. He remained in the same vicinity for days together, especially
when he had made a fresh kill. Tourist sightings over a few days were enough
for his location to be triangulated by poachers with a terrible—fatal—degree of
accuracy.
I
can never forget the day I was in a watch tower near a watering hole, when he
come to take a drink. After drinking his fill, he paused and cocked his head in
that oh-so-familiar manner of his. For a brief moment, I wondered if he’d sensed
my presence. But then, he padded silently back into the jungle and I lost sight
of him. I didn’t know then that it would be the last time I would see him
alive.
Tigers
are rarely shot. That would damage the skin. They are killed with clever snares
and poison bait. It is not an easy death. We went to the site where his radio
tag signal had last been detected fearing the worst, but even that didn’t
prepare us for what we found. A pile of flesh to which maggots had already
staked claim was all that remained of Dev. His skin, bones, teeth, claws—any
part of him the poachers deemed valuable—were gone. A beautiful, majestic living
being, an invaluable life, had been weighed against a pile of bones and skin
and, in the world of humans, come out lighter.
I
wonder if, in those final moments of his life, Dev finally saw us humans for
what we are—the most dangerous species on the planet. Or had he approached the
beckoning finger of death the same way he had responded to everything in life,
with a cocked head, curious, carefree, trusting.
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