— 4 —
Before Diane and I left Calcutta, we sought out local wildlife experts familiar with Sundarbans, hoping they could tell us what to expect.
No one presumed to predict what might happen to us in Sundarbans. Instead, people offered their own experiences, from which we began to assemble a partial, preliminary picture, a gap-toothed mosaic of science, mystery, fantasy, and contradiction.
We traveled to Buxa Tiger Reserve in northern West Bengal to talk with Pranabesh Sanyal, a former field director at Sundarbans; we went to Kanha National Park, where George Schaller had worked; we talked with Kalyan Chakrabarti at the Tollygunge Club, where we stayed in Calcutta. I’d chosen to stay at the Tolly because Anne Wright, a tiger expert and member of the World Conservation Union–IUCN Cat Specialist Group, lived there. (Her husband, Bob, also an ardent conservationist, managed the club.) Anne generously introduced us to other tiger experts.
One of them was Bonani Kakkar. Bonani is unusual for a middle-aged Indian woman: instead of the traditional draped sari, she wears Western pants and shirts; she does not decorate her forehead with a bindi, which most Indian women place between and above the brows; she keeps her dark, wavy hair cropped short rather than coiled into a bun on the back of the head. Both alone and with her tall, green-eyed husband, she has traveled all over India as well as to Africa, Europe, and America, working for the World Wildlife Fund, the United Nations’ Environmental Program, and the World Bank.
Bonani has met tigers on foot. Little frightens her. She is a tough woman, whose aura of sternness disappears only when she looses her waterfall-like laugh. We first met her at Kanha, and later she came to visit us at the Tolly. There she told us the story of how a tiger she never saw changed forever the way she thought of Sundarbans.
Bonani wasn’t studying tigers when she went to Sundarbans in February of 1986, she explained. A private wildlife consultant, she was searching for traces of a rare river terrapin, Batagur baska. Once common, the pointy-nosed terrapin was thought to be extinct over most of the Indian subcontinent, but it was rumored that some might have survived undetected in Sundarbans. Perhaps, she thought, the Batagur might share the same nesting beaches as the olive ridley sea turtles, who come ashore from the Bay of Bengal each winter to lay their eggs in pits they dig above the high-tide line. With a small team of other researchers, she planned to search for the Batagur’s tracks, nests, and egg fragments on the island of Mechua.
The night before the expedition was to depart, Bonani got a phone call from Pranabesh Sanyal, who was then field director of the reserve. She remembers his exact words: “Mrs. Kakkar, just be a little careful when you go to this island, because I forgot to tell you that the tiger there is an aggressive man-eater.”
“What do you mean ‘aggressive man-eater’?” Bonani tossed back. She thought he was joking. “I thought all man-eaters were aggressive!”
But Pranabesh was serious. “No, there are categories of man-eaters,” he told her. “This one is very aggressive. And we know he is found in that general area.” The island of Mechua is located on Sundarbans’ eastern sea face among a block of islands collectively known as Baghmara, which means “tiger-killed.”
Bonani is not easily frightened, so the field director’s words did not deter her. Besides, she said, it was too late to cancel the trip.
That was not Bonani’s first trip to Sundarbans, she told us. In 1983 Pranabesh had invited her to witness the results of a new field experiment.
He had commissioned a local clay artist, who normally made idols for Hindu festivals, to create several life-size dummies of villagers engaged in their work in the forest: a woodcutter, a fisherman, a honey collector. They were positioned in lifelike poses: the woodcutter swinging an axe, the fisherman sitting in a boat, the honey collector holding a basket beneath a tree. They were dressed in used garments redolent of human skin and sweat. And their expressions were heartbreakingly real: black-rimmed eyes wide with terror, red lips pursed—painted faces mesmerized with fear.
Around their necks Pranabesh circled galvanized wire. Each dummy was hooked up to a car battery hidden some yards away under a bush. In an effort to deter tigers from attacking people, the field director was marshaling the wisdom of Pavlov, teaching the tigers to associate attacking people with a painful electric shock. But first he had to see if the tigers would attack the dummies.
He placed several in the forest, and one day word reached him at his home in Calcutta that one of the models, a fisherman, had been struck.
Bonani, along with two forest guards, went with Pranabesh to see the results. They found the clay dummy face down in the mud. The tiger had ripped into the model as if it were flesh. Claw marks stretched from shoulder to waist. An arm was torn off. Fresh pugmarks showed that the attack had occurred early that morning.
The experiment—this phase at least—was a success. Both of them were excited, Bonani said, but then they felt something else. Pugmarks led away from the model into the creek. “Two or three of us walking back and forth with him, looking at these pugmarks,” she told us. “And then suddenly—it was a very narrow creek, and the other side was all fresh pugmarks—we realized the tiger could have been lurking just in the bush.”
Pranabesh, a lithesome man in his early forties, exudes an extraordinary Buddhalike confidence and cheer; Bonani considers him completely fearless. But he said to her, “Let’s go back.”
“You see,” said Bonani, “you really can’t walk on foot in Sundarbans and feel safe for even a minute.”
The dummies were the latest in a series of efforts to reduce what the Forest Department euphemistically calls “man-animal conflict.” These measures, which include a supplement to the insurance paid to families of tiger victims, comprise the single largest item in the reserve’s modest budget year after year.
The department’s efforts reflect successive field directors’ diverse ideas about why the tigers kill and eat people. In earlier programs the Forest Department bred wild pigs and released them into the reserve’s buffer zone to provide tigers with more prey—like placing offerings before an altar. The department dug freshwater ponds in the core area, hoping this resource would entice the tigers to stay there, where people were not supposed to go. Staff members say that the tigers do drink from these ponds, but they drink salt water also. Other efforts attempted to fortify forest workers. Some were outright bizarre. In 1981 an experimental Tiger Guard Head Gear was fashioned from bulletproof fiberglass, which you were supposed to wear over your head and neck in heat that reaches 100 degrees; another model, equally bulky and uncomfortable, featured long spikes poking macelike out of the nape. Of course no one wore it.
In 1986 a new approach was tried, an elegant type of deception. Arum Ram, a member of a science club in Calcutta, noted that the tigers almost never attacked from the front; they always sprang from behind, biting the back of the victim’s neck. His idea: plastic face masks worn on the back of the head. They were cheap, they were light, and they worked.
The first year the masks were used in quantity, none of the 2,500 villagers who wore them were attacked. Some men reported that tigers would still follow them, sometimes for hours. Often the person would hear the tiger growling, as if it were frustrated that the Janus-man had somehow cheated it, yet it seemed unable to perpetrate a similar breach.
The tigers’ unwillingness to attack men head on is well embedded in Sundarbans lore. Muslims explain it this way: on each man’s forehead Allah has written that man is king of all animals; this so irritates the tiger that he cannot bear to look upon it. Tigers adhere to this code of etiquette so strongly that they have been known to abandon human prey if the corpse, as they drag it off, becomes wedged by roots or logs in such a way that the animal must look into the victim’s face.
The masks worked as long as the tigers believed in them. Which was not for long. “After five or six months, they were finding out that this was not the front of the human being,” Kalyan Chakrabarti told me when he visited us at the Tollygunge Club.
Kalyan was an intense and fervent man in his fifties, possessed of a dense energy, as if all his intuitions and theories and stories and plans were physically compacted into his short, stout body. He was adamant on this point: “They know what a human being looks like,” he insisted. “They know there is a back and a front. Then they are finding out that one is not a good front.” The masks, he said, were “a little gimmick that worked for a particular period.”
(When we visited, although some officials still considered the masks effective, almost no one seemed to use them. Of all the villagers I met in Sundarbans, I found only one fishing group carrying the masks on their boat.)
Other measures have met with varying degrees of success. The pig-release project was discontinued years ago. Five or six electric dummies still occupy the forest, standing like sentries at timber-cutting and pond-digging projects. Each year the Forest Department strings more electric fencing around the reserve’s boundaries to allay people’s fears that tigers will stray into their villages. And in much the same way that developers erect street lights to discourage parking-lot vandalism, the Forest Department has installed more than a dozen solar-powered lights along a twenty-eight-mile stretch of shore. The villagers find the solar lights very convenient, whether they deter tigers or not.
But the man-eating has not stopped. Nothing—neither laws nor permits nor patrols—stops men from illegally crossing into the reserve’s forest core; and nothing—neither offerings nor armor nor trickery—stops the tigers who come to meet them.
“We arrived at Mechua at high tide,” Bonani remembered. “It was about two P.M.” The Forest Department had loaned the team searching for terrapin five guards, a double-barreled shotgun, a .315 rifle, and a ten-foot motorboat as well as a large launch and its crew. The pilot anchored the launch in a creek, and the research team took the motorboat up a channel from which they could wade to the sandy beach.
For four hours they searched the tall Saccharum grass and the white sand for traces of turtle tracks or eggshell fragments. Always a guard watched the creek for an approaching tiger. Another guard watched the forest, where a tiger might also await them.
Finding no traces of terrapins, the researchers gathered samples of the area’s plants and soils until the sky began to darken. Then they turned back.
Where the sandy beach ended, they moved into mud along the creek. Here they came across their own footprints. But now, superimposed on them, and moving in the opposite direction—the direction the team was now heading—were the pugmarks of a tiger.
Walking toward a dangerous animal you cannot see is one of the deepest human fears. Even people who spend their lives looking for tigers never get over the feeling of shock when they find one. And so Kalyan Chakrabarti was shocked—horrified—when, following the pugmarks of a tigress over a little ridge one day, he came face to face with a tigress and her cub. He told us about the encounter while we shared tea at the Tollygunge Club.
“She was looking at me as I was approaching, though I was not making great sound,” Kalyan said, leaning forward. “Her look was of curiosity at first, then aggression. She was thinking of her cub.” The pair, perhaps twenty yards away, was a potentially lethal combination. In other areas tigresses who normally ignore human beings will sometimes attack if they think their cubs are threatened; in Sundarbans tigresses teach their cubs to hunt people, just as tigresses elsewhere teach their cubs to hunt animal prey.
Kalyan’s mind raced: “If the tigress jumps, what will I do?” He had no weapon, not even a stick.
His first instinct was to run, but he knew that would have the same effect as pulling a string of yarn along the floor in front of a house cat. And he could not outrun a tigress.
His only hope, he realized, was to remain still.
For thirty minutes the tigress and the man watched each other. Kalyan remained motionless. A hermit crab crawled up inside his pant leg; still he didn’t move.
“Then,” Kalyan told me, “she made a judgment: this man is not my destroyer, this is my friend.”
Finally the tigress leaped to her feet, and the cub followed her into the forest.
“We were very worried,” recalls Kushal Mookherjee. Thirty-five and athletically slim, Kushal, like Bonani, was a private wildlife consultant. He lived with his gracious young wife in a large walkup apartment with a balcony they have filled with flowers, where we visited them. Bonani described Kushal as “a careful, cautious person,” but not a fearful one. Otherwise he would never have gone on the terrapin expedition to Sundarbans with her. But at the point he was now describing, he wished he hadn’t.
By the time they spotted the tiger’s tracks atop their own, it was already getting dark. “The sun had set—it would be totally dark in forty-five minutes,” Kushal told us. “And then suddenly we saw that something was lying on the vast stretch of mud flat ahead of us. It was our boat.”
The tide had receded a few hundred meters and left their motorboat stranded on the mud.
For a precious fifteen minutes of lingering light, they pushed and heaved and shoved at the boat, trying to get it to the water. In the process one of their photographer’s cameras fell into the muddy salt water. And while trying to help the scientists retrieve it, the guard dropped the cartridges for his gun into the water too.
The guard picked up the cartridges, wiped them on his hand, and replaced them in his belt. Bonani asked if they would still fire. No, he answered matter-of-factly, “but they have been issued to me,” he told her, “and I must have the right number when my superior asks me.”
Even when they all heaved against the boat, the craft didn’t budge. Only the tide could lift it. The Forest Department guards refused to abandon their vessel. “We are government servants,” they told the team. “We have to stay here with the boat. It is already stuck. Now it may drown. Even if we die here, we have to save the boat.”
So two of the guards stayed with the boat. They kept the rifle. The other guard took the double-barreled shotgun, with its sodden and useless cartridges, and started walking with the researchers in the direction of the launch, several kilometers away—walking toward the tiger.
Kalyan firmly believes that a tiger will not attack a person who it thinks means no harm. “In this way, I think that they have some sixth sense, to find out who is a protector of the forest and who is a destroyer.
“So this animal,” he asserted, “must have got full control and wisdom about him and the area and human behavior; so regarding the reduction of human casualty, it is my thinking that if we can show that we are all protectors of the forest, respectful of the forest, and not destroyers, then there could be no question of a person being killed by a tiger.”
For this reason, he claims, forest guards are seldom killed by tigers; the animals have learned to recognize the khaki Forest Department uniforms and identify these people as “forest protectors.”
A forest guard, however, had been killed just that March. But, Kalyan told me, the guard was not in uniform at the time; he was wearing the traditional Bengali lungi. “Then the tiger’s system of discrimination between a protector and a destroyer failed,” he said. “A careful, watchful, respectful person is never killed by the tiger in Sundarbans.”
Later, on board Monorama, I asked Rathin about the incident. He had personally investigated the forest guard’s death. According to his report the guard, who was with three companions, had seen that the tiger was coming for him. He turned, and knelt to better aim his gun, but the gun wouldn’t fire. Two of his companions stood helpless, mesmerized as the tiger leaped on him. A third, who held an axe, fainted with fear; but before he passed out, he managed to strike the tiger, who ran away without taking the guard’s body.
As part of his investigation, Rathin had to view the corpse. Kalyan was wrong, he told me. The guard was wearing full uniform.
“The forest was gradually moving towards us—the water and the forest is converging—and it is very difficult to move,” Kushal remembered. As they struggled to reach the launch, the researchers were nearly exhausted. Mud devoured their limbs. Carrying backpacks laden with photographic equipment and plant and soil samples, they sank up to their knees in the mud. The muscles in their legs shook and cramped. Finally one man fell and could not get up.
Unable to do anything else, they rested. Around them loomed the forest, clotted with the gnarled and stunted genwa mangroves. At last they were able to pull their companion from the mud. His legs shook so badly he still could not stand, much less walk. They contemplated climbing a tree, but the tallest was only fifteen feet. Local people, if marooned overnight in the forest, will sometimes climb a tall tree to sleep. It is generally believed that tigers, unlike leopards, do not climb trees; this is not true. In the state of Rajasthan, Colonel Kesri Singh shot a tiger who had climbed a banyan tree overlooking a water trough in order to ambush the cattle who watered there. Two hunters, F. W. Champion and Oliver Smythies, reported oddly identical experiences: each watched a wounded tiger swarm up a tree wherein his wife waited, horrified, as the tiger shook the treetop violently with both front paws. Kenneth Anderson was clawed in the backside when the man-eater he was hunting climbed fifteen feet up the tree in which he was hiding.
Tigers everywhere enjoy clawing trees, which they may do to mark them, to sharpen their claws, or to avail themselves of some medicinal value; at least one favored tree, the biga, exudes an astringent, blood-red gum that may act as a disinfectant. But in the forests where these trees grow, the people say the tiger likes to see blood running down the trunk.
Rathin later told me of a case his staff investigated one June. Three villagers had gone to cut wood illegally at Khatuajhuri Compartment, a government-owned block of forest harvested periodically by Forest Department contractors. Since their village was far away, they stayed overnight in the forest, leaving their boat anchored as each man slept in a different tree.
That night a storm raged for several hours. During the lightning and thunder the men could not hear each other’s low whistles, the means by which they kept in touch.
At dawn, when the storm stopped, two of the men descended their trees and looked for the third. His tree was empty. Perhaps, they thought, he had climbed down earlier. They went to look for him in the boat, but he wasn’t there, either. Frightened, they went to the Forest Department camp close by.
Forest Department officers climbed the tree where the man had been sitting on a bough sixteen feet from the ground. There they found claw marks and blood and bits of flesh.
Pugmarks at the base of the tree would have confirmed that a tiger had climbed it, but now it was high tide, and the forest floor was immersed in water. Any footprints were obliterated.
Local people believe that tigers do not climb trees; they derive a different conclusion from such an attack, Rathin said. This death was the work of a bagho bhuth, a tiger ghost, and bagho bhuth don’t leave any footprints.
The research team, carrying their injured companion, trudged on through the mud. Finally, through their binoculars, they could see the outline of the launch, but no one was out on deck.
“Now we were in a big dilemma,” recalled Kushal. “Because if we called out, they might hear us and bring the launch to us, and we would go into the water and climb aboard—but it will also make the tiger aware of us.”
Although the launch was still far away, they decided to shout. The water carried their voices. Still, no one came out on deck.
“We figured, now the tiger knows where we are,” Kushal said. “We have started calling, we should go on calling. Like hell we shouted!” And then they heard the launch’s engine roar. “The most beautiful sound I ever heard!” Kushal said, and laughed.
By the time the launch picked them up, it was seven P.M.—pitch black, new moon. The launch pilot then navigated the narrow channel back to the tiny motorboat, where the guards waited with their old .315 rifle. The launch crew turned on a strong searchlight and finally spotted the little boat, still stuck in the black mud. Then they saw the guards:
“They were sitting about fifty feet from the mangrove forest,” Kushal said, still in awe. “They were in a boat hardly bigger than a sofa. They wouldn’t shout because this would attract the tiger. And that Mechua tiger, we heard later, had killed thirty or forty people in the past five or ten years. Those two people—I don’t know how they got the courage.”
High tide retrieved the motorboat around nine or nine-thirty, and the researchers heard the guards start the motor. “Until then we were really afraid the tiger would get them,” Bonani remembered. “But the tiger was on the other bank. He was waiting and watching us.”
In the darkness chital barked an alarm—a high yip like a terrier’s. The tiger, the people thought, must be moving nearby.
Where is the tiger? The question surely pulses in the minds of the deer as they bend their slender necks to sniff and nibble at leaf litter. From a watchtower in Bangladesh I had seen a chital doe approach a freshwater pond, her staccato walk on mud-caked hooves occasionally punctuated with nervous stamps, her funneled ears swiveling to sounds we could not hear. Only six times in five minutes did she dare bend her neck to the ground, revealing the parallel rows of white spots on either side of her spine. On the beaches of Sundarbans, away from the forest soils that digest death so quickly, you can sometimes find the vertebrae of these deer, porous with age and bleached beyond white.
In daylight the deer often keep company with rhesus monkeys. Beneath the trees where the monkeys sit, showing pendulous pink testicles and orange rumps, the deer wait for a shower of food, bits of the olive-shaped, berrylike keora fruit and leaves. It is said that the deer follow the monkeys because from their treetop position the macaques can spot a tiger from far away. Each species knows the other’s calls, and at the monkeys’ chattery screams or the deer’s barked warning, both groups will scatter in an explosion of hooves and hands. But even with so many eyes watching, so many ears cocked, the tiger is often too quiet, too lithe, too cunning to give away its presence.
The tiger oozes through the forest, quiet as the mud, invisible as the wind. What is the tiger doing?
The tiger is watching.
“As we are studying them,” Kalyan assured Dianne and me, “they are also studying us. They also study human beings: their nature, their movement, their posture, their walking system; all these things are coming to the brain of the tiger. They are all the time monitoring our behavior, as we are monitoring their behavior.”
Two decades of research, he said, support his assertion. Kalyan’s data, collected between 1962 and 1982, reported at international symposiums and published in some of India’s most prestigious scientific journals, show that well over half of the tiger attacks on humans occur between seven and nine A.M. and between three and five P.M., precisely those times when people are most likely to be entering or leaving the forest—times, Kalyan says, when people are least alert to danger.
Tigers are acutely aware of the schedules of their prey: this has been well documented at Chitawan and Kanha, where observers chronicled the activity periods of three species of deer—chital, hog deer, and sambar—and how these varied from the cool season to the hot season, from cloudy days to sunny days. They found, not surprisingly, that the tigers adjusted their hunting hours to the times when their prey was most active and thus easiest to spot. (The structure of their retina makes it difficult for cats to detect motionless prey.) Observations of American mountain lions and of Asiatic lions at the Gir Forest in India confirm that they too adjust their daily rhythms to those of their prey. At Chitawan, where tigers have been known to kill leopards at baits set out to attract cats, leopards altered their schedules to avoid tigers.
So it is no wonder that Sundarbans tigers know when people enter and leave the forest and when they go to sleep. Most nighttime attacks happen around eleven P.M., when people are fast asleep on their boats. The tigers know when the honey collectors come to the forest: the honey season begins in April, and that is the month when the most people are killed. The areas in which honey collection is permitted change from time to time according to Forest Department rules, and this the tigers know too. When eight of the fifteen forest blocks in the park were closed to human entry in 1974, tigers migrated to the new honey collection areas.
With A. B. Chaudhuri, the former director of the Forest Survey of India, Kalyan analyzed the factors surrounding human kills by tigers: time of day, time of year, habitat type, location of kill, profession of the person attacked. “These factors also prove high degree of intelligence and diabolical understanding of human behavior by the tiger of the area,” they wrote in a paper presented at the International Symposium on Tiger held in Delhi in 1979.
“The tiger understands the human mind,” Pranabesh Sanyal wrote in the park’s management plan in 1987, “and all their plans of attack are designed on human movement.”
With everyone safe and accounted for, the terrapin team was at last on the big boat. They washed the mud off their feet and legs and unpacked the plant collections while the crew prepared tea.
Then they heard a loud thump. The boat jerked. “It felt as if someone had just pulled down the back of the launch,” said Kushal. “The front came up and then—bang—it came down.”
For a moment everyone froze, silent. Something had landed on the ledge outside the lower deck, on the planks where the boatmen walk back and forth with their long bamboo poles to free the boat when it gets stuck in the mud. Someone hurriedly shut all the windows to the lower deck.
And then the crew of the boat began to chant: “Ma-ma-mama. ” Ma-ma is Bengali for mother’s brother. “Ma-ma-ma-ma.” Ma, Bengali for mother, is also the term used to call on the powers of a goddess.
Bonani remembered then that earlier in the trip she had asked one of the boatmen if he had ever seen a bagh, the Bengali word for tiger.
“And this man was so angry with me,” Bonani remembers. “He said you never use the word bagh in Sundarbans. You must call him Ma-ma. You don’t call him bagh. It’s disrespectful. It’s inviting danger to call him just a bagh.”
For ten minutes no one moved. Bonani said it felt like ten hours. Kushal’s face was ashen. Then they heard a splash, and the boat rocked slightly.
“Strange things happen in Sundarbans, and people are reluctant to talk about them,” a forestry official told me. So reluctant, in fact, that before he would tell me this story, he made me promise never to reveal who told it.
Once he was traveling on a government launch just outside the core area of the tiger reserve. It was about eleven at night, but a mild breeze was stirring, which tempted him to stay awake and sit up on deck through the night.
He watched the forest idly. At a bend in the creek he noticed that the mixture of vegetation differed markedly on the two banks. To his right a pure stand of keora trees leaned like willows over the water; on the bank to his left was an association of mangroves: dhundul with melon-sized green fruits; gorjon, standing as if on tiptoe atop masses of stilt roots; the short genwa with downward-pointing, curled leaves.
Just then, quite suddenly, the breeze gathered itself into a strong wind that heaved and sighed and moaned. It blew so hard that the big keoras on the right bank swayed and bent. But that was not the remarkable thing about the wind that night. What was odd, even eerie, was this: on the mangroves along the left bank, 300 feet across the water, not a leaf stirred.
“It was so unbelievably strange,” the man told me, “that I called up Mourali, my orderly, who was sleeping on the bunk on the deck, to be a witness to this strange phenomenon and to explain it if he could.” Mourali had worked in the Forest Department for thirty years. He had been born and raised in Sundarbans, and he knew many things.
“He looked me straight in the eye,” the official recalled, “and with a mild smile asked me not to take notice of it at all. But he insisted we go down to the cabin, that we should not remain on deck any more.”
The officer had been trained at university to ask questions of the natural world, to find explanations for what he saw. “I said, ‘This is very strange, yet you appear as if you have experienced this before.’ Mourali took it very casually. ‘But,’ I asked, ‘how is this possible? The left bank was absolutely calm.’ Mourali kept on smiling—as if he knew what was happening, but that I would not believe him if he told me.”
Mourali said that he had on occasion experienced strange things in Sundarbans. The officer continued to press him for information. Finally, still smiling, Mourali replied, “Spirits of the dead often raise up sudden whirlwinds; however, it doesn’t harm anyone.” But still he suggested they retire below.
This convinced the officer. “I left immediately without waiting to know how long this continued,” he said. “I was scared.”
The sareng piloting the craft later told him the wind continued like that for twenty minutes, affecting only one side of the river, until the vessel reached an area called Chogazi, when it abruptly stopped.
“They say that these are the spirits of people killed by tigers,” the man said, “and because the spirits are restless, they shake the trees.”
“Do you believe this?” I asked.
“If you had been with me through that,” he said, “you would believe almost anything.”
As scientists, both Bonani and Kushal say they still don’t know for sure what moved the boat that night. “It was certainly something powerful, something very heavy, to either push up the front or pull down the back of that boat—a huge shark, maybe, or a crocodile,” Kushal said. The splash? Some mangroves grow large fruits called gol, said Bonani, that fall into the water with a loud plop. But the crew had no doubt: it was a tiger.
Before that trip Bonani had heard a sad story from her mother’s maid, who had moved away from Sundarbans after her husband’s death. One day, after a visit to her family, she returned to Calcutta in tears. Her son, who was a fisherman, had been fishing in one of the creeks, she said, and a tiger had come out of the water, grabbed him in its jaws, jumped overboard, and swum away. There was nothing anybody could do.
At the time, Bonani thought, “Well, maybe he fell overboard. But did the tiger really come and take him off the boat?” Surely it could not be true.
But now she has changed her mind. “After this incident,” she said, “I think all of us who were in the boat that day, if we go to Sundarbans again, we’ll listen, now, to what the local people say.”