Why won’t the beasts let the beauty alone?

“…the night was silent, except for the sounds of the (kitchen) fire, which hissed and cackled as we fed the flames. Then the still air broke. ‘aaaaaummm, aaaaaummm —’ a soft moan rolling over the hills and through the forest. It was a tigress calling for her mate. Continual. Persistent. Desperate. We listened, unable to delight in the sign of the animal, distressed by the doomed fate of Betla’s only tigress, Rani. She was the queen of her forest, but her kingdom was an island. There were no males to woo, tease, tantalize and mate …”

Continual. Persistent. Desperate.

The call, the cry, of Rani; and of this amazing, beautiful, frightening book, The King and I: Travels in Tigerland, by Prerna Singh Bindra.

Who amongst us has not dreamt or fantasised about seeing a tiger in the wild? And how many of us have actually lived out that moment, that first sighting of the tiger’s majesty: “an experience so profound that it is deeply etched in my mind and heart, forever”?

And this book, this cry, arises directly from that first sighting: “… should I have been scared, hemmed in on all sides by nature’s most powerful predator? I wasn’t. I just felt blessed. And touched by the trust shown in us humans, even when we had persecuted them ruthlessly. I wanted the moment to last forever, but good times rarely do, and I went away, a firm tiger addict.”

The big cats — tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard — these are the wonders that Bindra pursues throughout the vanishing forests of India. Pursues with a passion, a love, a fear that fill the “paper forests” of this book, just as the big cats once filled the real forests. Ranthambore, Rajaji, Sundarbans, Gir, Kaziranga, Corbett, Sariska, Manas — the names of the last remaining homes of the big cats echo down the pages of the book like those of famous freedom fighters. Which, truly, they are, for only around 2,000 tigers are alive in today’s India; as for lions, there are less than 350 of them left; at least one leopard is killed everyday, and the “fate of the snow leopard is unknown.”

But — and herein lies the beauty of this book — lamentation is not the true colour, the true echo, of Bindra’s cry. It is a cry, above all, of wonder and awe; of pleasure and deep, personal joy; of commitment and care. As you walk the wilds with Bindra, as you feel the chill of the mornings and the velvet fear of the nights, as you sense and hear the sounds of the forest, as you suddenly know for certain that a tiger is close, close at hand, you fall in love with the big cats forever. That is what Bindra does so well in this book, for once you love the tiger forever, you’ll want to save it forever.

My favourite chapter is the one on the Sunderbans, where the tiger is feared and revered, god and ghost, phantom and fantasy; where water and land are one, where yesterday and today are hand in hand, where “tigers are stuff legends and myths are made of”; and yet, where tomorrow for the tiger is the greatest challenge of all.

To live in the Sunderbans is to know that the tiger is everywhere; to survive, you must worship the tiger, and understand the tiger. In this land where the common laws of man have almost no meaning, the tiger rules…

There is a deep lesson in this for all of us: the tiger must be worshipped and understood; and then be left alone. That is the only way their majesty will survive. As Bindra says again and again in her book, the tiger must be given space and time — to be itself, to grow, to reproduce, to flourish. It is the very least we can do for an animal which is the true ‘King of India’.