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Dickie Bellringer travelled on a Tailormade Holiday to India and submitted this entry to our writing competition.
Bengal Tiger by Raghu Kulkarni
India - Tailormade
We are ordinary people who occasionally find themselves in extraordinary places. India is extraordinary. Our last experience of it is the humidity and chaos outside Mumbai International Airport. Security is tight – you cannot even enter the building without a passport and ticket. We are assailed by the noise of the crowd outside. Ticket in one hand, passport in the other, maintaining awareness of pickpockets, we make our way through the scrum and into the relative quiet of the airport building. Time to change rupees back into sterling before heading to the multi-layered security process, which seems designed to strip layers of dignity. It is difficult to keep reminding oneself that this is a ‘good thing’.
His image pops unbidden into my mind – a big powerful male, still dominant in his domain despite his great age of more than 10 years. My wife, Lindsey, is the first to sight him on the road ahead towards the end of an uneventful game drive. Steadily advancing, he covers the ground disconcertingly quickly and our driver – the most excellent naturalist Vijay Joshi at Bandhavgarh Jungle Lodge – demonstrates remarkable skills as he reverses back up the rough track. In doing so he keeps a safe distance between us and Bamera. This magnificent and famous Bengal Tiger – probably in his last year – keeps coming. We know that tiger attacks on tourist vehicles are vanishingly rare, but this does not stop a frisson of fear. He is so big and powerful – one swipe of his fearful paw would suffice. Take more pictures I say to myself. It’s OK. Our guide seeks to reassure us as Vijay reverses again and again. I can almost feel the expression of concern on my face, even though deep down I know that I am perfectly safe. But this creature has such a presence. And even Vijay later admits to an edge of fear.
India itself can be unnerving even when not in the presence of a powerful Tiger. It was once described to me as functioning anarchy, a volatile dynamic where life, to the outsider at least, teeters on the edge of collapse. You feel as though the social structure – held together by the sort of union between reason and belief that was torn asunder in the West by the Enlightenment – would implode if the sheer velocity of life slowed too much.
We travel between Tiger parks Tadoba, Pench, Satpura, Bandhavgarh and Kanha in air-conditioned bubbles, uncomfortably divorced from the volatile dynamics of Indian life but also tantalisingly close. Our‘bubble’ moves on.
I am being searched by a man in a uniform yet again. He inspects my recently changed sterling and the few remaining rupees in another wallet.
Bamera continues to advance and Vijay continues to retreat. The Tiger, as contemptuous of our presence as he is ignorant of his species’ frailty, turns into the jungle, allowing Vijay to turn the vehicle around. When Bamera returns to the track we are now following him.
Eventually we emerge from security, checking passports, boarding passes and money. We need a drink and find a small snack bar tucked away. We order two ‘draught’ Kingfishers which, confusingly, come in cans, and a couple of samosas. Hours now stretch before our flight home in the early hours of the morning – time enough to reflect.
Bamera finally moves off into the jungle and out of sight leaving us exhilarated and frantically checking the backs of our cameras to see if we have any decent shots. Crikey, that’s terrible; one’s OK but cuts his huge paws off (how did I manage to do that?); that one’s a bit out of focus; ah, there’s a cracker. And Linz has some good shots as well.
We spot a cyclist from our ‘bubble’ with a radio fixed to his handlebars – his very own sound system as he pedals around gigantic potholes; a stretch of road pitted with potholes and swirls of contorted tarmac making passage extremely difficult – but bizarrely bracketed by two sleeping policemen; the trucks become more colourfully decorated as we travel west into Madhya Pradesh – not quite the gaudy juggernauts of Rajasthan but striking enough.
Other highlights spring to mind, including a dramatic hunt as a young female Leopard seeks to outwit a female Sambar deer as she courageously stands her ground in defence of her fawn. We don’t see the end but it is probably the fawn’s last day.
Memories help to fill the long and tedious hours as we await our flight home. Now we are retired this was to be a last hurrah in terms of long-haul flights to extraordinary places. But now, at long last, we are sitting on the plane home. India calls – maybe we will pay this extraordinary place another visit sometime after all. Just one more last hurrah!
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