A solo trip to nowhere
Mother dearest loves melodrama. In my growing years, she and I often found ourselves, willingly or otherwise, embroiled in verbal sparring sessions. There was never a dearth of reasons for the fusillades we hurled at each other, but this much was certain: there was never a dull moment or the slightest doubt as to who won the battle.On the eve of my first, solo jaunt into the wild, as I packed my rucksack in dancing candlelight, (Power cuts were common in that corner of the world that we lived in) my mother hovered about in my room, pacing about with her hands on her hips or clutching her head or swatting mosquitoes.
'But where the hell are you going, men?' she asked. 'Madhya Pradesh? Kanha National Park? Arre, but what kind of a place is this? A jungle, full of tigers? Where there is no phone, no way to communicate? (I got my first mobile phone only in 2002.) Where you've never gone before? A dormitory bed in the middle of the jungle? Why do you always do such things, men? Always give me some tension or the other?'
For the next ten minutes, her rant was about how the world was a crazy place already, alluding to the WTC attacks more than a month ago. What that had to do with my travelling solo, that too to a jungle, I don't know.
'Exactly Ma, the world is a crazy place already!' I said as I stuffed Father's brown jacket into the rucksack. A friend who hailed from Chhindwara in MP told me that it could get really cold in the plains of MP in November. One needed at least two layers of clothes and adequate protection for the ears and the hands.
'Considering where I work right now, and the fact that we live in Mumbai, don't you think a forest will be much safer? Besides, you know I don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs. So why worry?'
Honestly, at that moment even I had that sliver of apprehension wagging like a little tail at the back of my mind. For the first time ever, I was embarking on a trip to a place not many in our known circles, in fact almost nobody, had ventured to. Mother even blamed Father for introducing me to such weird interests as wildlife and jungles and things. But mothers, as you already know, will always be mothers. And mothers of boys in general, and the Indian, over-possessive, dramatic variety in particular, are incorrigible to say the least.
Eventually, all it took was a broad smile of assurance and a pat on the cheek to allay some of her fretfulness. The next morning, I left for Kurla Terminus to board the Godan Express to Jabalpur.
A feral child in Urbania
My first conscious acquaintance with Kanha National Park happened in, probably, 1998, in the unlikeliest of places. Not sure exactly when, but it was an afternoon when the harsh sunlight tamed by the fluttering, dusty curtains, scattered dancing shapes on the mosaic floor of my then-girlfriend's bedroom. A majestic dominant male tiger scowled at me from a poster, which had appeared on her bedroom wall. In a corner of the poster was the logo of Kanha National Park. Turned out that her friend and neighbour, a grad student of Zoology or Biology I think, had just returned from a class excursion to the wildlife sanctuary and had brought her the poster from there. |
| My photograph of a tiger spotted in Bandhavgarh National Park in March 2008 |
'Do you like wildlife?' I asked her all of a sudden. Then, she was still a rather docile, mild-mannered girl, nothing like the ranting, wild, rampaging woman she metamorphosized into, post marriage. She shrugged. She wouldn't venture out into the wild looking for any, but had no problem watching an episode or two on wildlife on Discovery or National Geographic. On the contrary, for me, that poster brought back a passion for wildlife that I had locked away in some dank, unattended vault of my mind. As a kid, I nursed a strong passion for wildlife, often fancying myself a Tarzan or a Mowgli incarnate. I dangled on my father's arm all the way to Eros or Ambar-Oscar theatre to watch "Beautiful People" and "Tarzan", aware of my mother's absence on these jaunts. On our summer-holiday trips to the ancestral home in Kerala, well before the advent of satellite television, one of my favourite games was to imagine that the woods surrounding my father's ancestral home was actually Kipling's jungle teeming with wildlife. I was either Tarzan or Mowgli (in any case, the hot and humid weather ensured that I wore only a pair of shorts), and the mongrel served as Bagheera (if it was a black dog) or a lion (if it was a brown one).
Some of my favourite movies to this day include The Jungle Book and The Lion King (Used to constantly explain to an ex-girlfriend why The Lion King was the best movie there ever was, but those conversations were not the reason for her becoming an "ex"!). Father had once gifted me a video cassette of 'Tiger, Tiger' a documentary on Billy Arjan Singh, the legendary conservationist who successfully reintroduced the tigress, Tara, and leopards, Harriet and Juliette, from captivity into the wild. I'm sure I've watched the documentary more than a hundred times, till the videocassette reel got eaten by cockroaches and the cassette player died. I thought in passing then, that afternoon at my girlfriend's place, that I should make a trip to a jungle sometime. And left it at that.
Call of the wild
The years rolled on by. Y2K came with a lot of brouhaha and changed to 2001 without as much as a whimper, but a whole lot of things had changed in my life. In 2001, while working at the Times of India, I had enrolled myself into a Journalism course at XIC, Mumbai. We often had visiting faculty including the likes of Jerry Pinto, Pinky Virani, and Sucheta Dalal. Two such guest lecturers included authors Carroll Moulton and Ernie Hulsey who conducted a session on wildlife documentation and also promoted their book, Kanha Tiger Reserve: Portrait of an Indian National Park. |
| Cover of Carroll's and Ernie's book |
I promptly bought the book and studiously read it for the next few months. By then, the course was over and I had begun working at the Consulate of Israel in Mumbai. Vacation time was coming up in November and I had finished reading the novels I had bought from the street vendors in Churchgate. One afternoon, while rummaging through my bookshelf, the Kanha book popped out. I flicked the pages and paused to trawl through the hand-drawn map of the national park. I also took a look at the black-and-white photographs of the authors themselves, of the wildlife they'd seen numerous times in the park, the famous mahouts and forest guides of Kanha (Ashok Jharia was one of them), and also Jane Swamy, our esteemed professor in XIC, who had accompanied the authors on more than one trip to Kanha.
Now my initial vacation plan was to board an overnight Paulo bus to Goa and stay at my father's place (Then, he was living and working in Goa). By day, I planned to hop from one local bus to the other and bum about on the many beaches over there. But Goa I'd visited at least a dozen times already, and to go alone once again was not an exciting prospect. Besides, many life-altering changes were on the anvil, so I had to make the most of this vacation. That was when the Kanha book fell almost literally into my lap.
The next task was to find company willing enough to travel to a wildlife sanctuary. My brother-in-law was still young, in high school, and wasn't my 'bro-in-law' yet. I asked college friends but they were busy and not interested in travelling to a jungle.
Then I asked 'local-train' friends (Like a true Mumbaikar, I had friends on the local train with whom I commuted every day), but there weren't any takers, literally, in that compartment either. I asked friends in the neighbourhood, asked cousins, current and former colleagues, my girlfriend (who thought the very notion of travelling with me out of the city was sacrilegious!), former girlfriends who were still in touch, even mere acquaintances and, on one instance, a complete stranger! But nobody seemed to want to go to a wildlife sanctuary (or accompany me at least).
A pretty colleague at the consulate agreed, but other staff dissuaded her from travelling into a remote place without security personnel. Although I was excited initially at the prospect of travelling with a 'foreigner female', later on, even I was apprehensive, because this was going to be my first trip to the North, and I'd only heard scary tales about North India. Yes, technically, Madhya Pradesh isn't "the North". But for us coastal folk in West India, anything north of Surat on the Western Railway line and north of Nashik on the Central line, is "The North". Later, I met a few friends and colleagues in Chennai and Bangalore who called Mumbai "Naarth India"!
 |
| Hallowed dormitory in Kisli, managed by MP Tourism |
By October 2001, I decided not to wait for anybody. If a solo trip is what this had to be, so be it. I first checked whether train tickets to and from Jabalpur were available, and then went to the MP Tourism office in Cuffe Parade to book a dorm bed for myself for four nights in Kanha National Park. Little did I know then that the dormitory in Kisli village, 3.5 kilometres within the core forest area of Kanha, was going to be my annual "Pilgrimage" destination for the next six years!
In the next part of this post, I will write about the adventures of my first trip to Kanha. Watch this space.
See next: Part 3.2
No comments:
Post a Comment