The Faizabad Tigress

For weeks, the daily update about her in the newspaper was my first brush with reality. I would get up and want to know immediately if she had lived another day. Of course, at that time, I did not even know that she was 'she'. Like so much else about her, her sex too remained a mystery till her death. 

As chronicled by all the papers, she had left Pilibhit forests in UP around the 11th of November 2008, and had covered a distance of 400 km on foot, padding through riverbank forests, taking swipes at village cattle and consuming them every few days. She had nearly reached Lucknow, spending weeks in nearby Barabanki, before coming to the Kumarganj forest range in Faizabad district on December 28. There she had stayed put, and was proving very tough for the UP Forest Department to capture. They put out live bait, and she failed to show up. They tried tempting her with another tigress (remember they thought she was a tiger?) and she didn't show any interest. They concluded therefore that this young tiger had not yet reached maturity.

Meanwhile, there were umpteen reports of Forest staff who had become so frightened at the sight of her that one had clambered into the cage meant to trap her and locked himself inside while she ate the meat which had been left outside as bait. Experts from Corbett National Park and Dudhwa, Dehradun and elsewhere were said to be finding it extremely hard to track her. But what was extremely upsetting right from the beginning was the Forest department's determination to have her killed. Three human beings were said to have been killed by this tiger/tigress and early on, she was declared a 'man-eater' with her tracking being for the express purpose of having her killed.

I wrote to the Rashtrapati Bhavan for a Presidential pardon. A teacher in Rae Bareli filed a PIL asking that the three tigers then roaming Uttar Pradesh - in Faizabad, Lakhimpur and Azamgarh, all be captured alive and not killed. A dedicated team from WTI, the Wildlife Trust of India, assisted the Forest department pressing for a live capture all the time. Another PIL was filed by wildlife enthusiast and member of the Uttarakhand State Wildlife Board, Kaushlendra Singh. But all this seemed so much chatter before the implacable decision of the UP Forest Department to kill this tiger. This resolve of theirs kept coming through in daily press briefings. No animal-lover, or anyone who actually took seriously the tiger's 'National Animal' status for India seriously, could understand why they should be so determined to shoot dead instead of tranquilize and capture. All through January 2009, I prayed each day that this young tiger would live its full life and not fall to a hunter's bullet. Such prayers seemed the only recourse against the Kafkaesque tactics of the Forest Dept.

On February 23, Shivaratri day, I was mighty kicked as I drove my family to a Shiva shrine in nearby Ambedkar Nagar, about 60 km away. I was singing 'Jai Ho', the anthem of that morning, without knowing about its Oscar sweep. Life seemed good and the tiger wise enough to withstand all the teams that had tried to track it on long winter nights for over two months. But just a day later, I was crying so much I alarmed myself. The photograph of the dead tigress, shot by self-styled shikari Nawab Shafaat Ali Khan of Hyderabad on the front page of 'Amar Ujala' was too much for me. How could they have hounded such a splendid young animal to this indignified death? And the worst blow was the discovery that she was a tigress who could have been the mother of several cubs, after she had been shot. 

Somehow, for me, this tiger's death represented all that is so difficult to take about life in Uttar Pradesh - astounding levels of ignorance, stupidity and greed. Insensitivity and callousness on a scale that defies description. I mourned for days, unable to immediately recover my appetite to go on living. Of course, I rallied to take some steps to vent my feelings - shot off an open letter to the so-called Nawab for the local papers, sent off an RTI enquiry about how the tigress' remains were disposed off and how it was ensured that none of these would find their way into the illegal intenational market for tigers' parts. But none of this made a difference to the overwhelming grief. The realization that this world was too cruel to let a magnificent young, spirited, and independent creature live. I truly loathed all of humanity for some time, our endless propagation, our rapacious appetite for every resource that makes for life on earth. I wished I could have let this tigress live even if  it meant substituting its life with my own.

Did I love her so excessively because of our being fellow displaced citizens? She had traveled very far to make a new life for herself, just as I have in recent times. I don't know. But one of my prayers for an after-death experience is definitely this - that I get to bury my face in the orange fur around her neck, and whisper how much I love her into her round, white tipped ears.