— 6 —
Hunted by a tiger.
So seldom do we Westerners think of our own flesh as meat. So seldom do we consider ourselves another being’s food. So seldom do we dare think that a clawed predator could stalk us, kill us with its face, chew our meat from our bones.
Surely the idea surfaces periodically from the sea of our unconscious, the way a sea turtle surfaces to breathe—but when it does, we are not looking. Like the turtles unseen beneath the sea, like the crocodile submerged in the tea-colored water, like the tiger invisible behind a blade of grass, the fear lurks large though hidden, so frightful we dare not even utter its name.
Early in his career my friend Dr. Richard Estes (who is now a world-renowned expert on antelopes) worked on a wildlife survey in Burma. For two nights he was forced to camp in an area where a man-eating tiger was known to range. The first night, as Dick was hunting the big sambar deer for dinner, the back of his neck prickled; he felt that he was being hunted too. The next night he woke at three A.M. to find the flames of his fire, the only guard at his thin tent, had gone out. He rebuilt it and slept, but at daylight, when he woke, he saw that his tent was encircled with the footprints of a tiger. Dick, then in his twenties, does not remember feeling terror so much as indignity. A tiger had considered eating him, and he recalls thinking, “Doesn’t this tiger know who I am?”
But of course the tiger knows exactly who we are.
At the Sajnekhali Mangrove Interpretation Center, a photo in one of the small wooden buildings is captioned “tiger accident victim.” The photo shows a small brown man lying on the mud, coiled like a prawn. His belly and back are ripped open; his intestines boil out through his lower back. (Rathin once examined the corpse of a man similarly injured: “The intestines came out through the wound like bulbs, like sacs full of pain,” he said.) When Dianne and I first arrived, we looked at that photo and thought: not me, not me.
We live in a land where our ancestors felled the forests and eradicated the predators so that we could pretend we are not made of meat.
But the tiger knows this is not true. For beneath our professions and our words, beneath our culture and our clothing—beneath our very skin—we are still, we are always, as we have been since the creation of our kind, prey in the mind and the jaws of the tiger.
It is a truth we remember in our childhood dreams of monsters lurking in the dark. The ancestors of the tigers, the leopards, stalked our progenitors from the Pliocene through the Pleistocene; their fearsome cousins, the saber-toothed tigers, with curved, stabbing canine teeth as long as a woman’s forearm, hunted us for eons. This fact, like our instinctive fear of falling—legacy of our tree-dwelling ancestors—we cannot even now completely forget. Though we may work in steel-boned skyscrapers, though we can conceive children in test tubes, though our scientists have invented chemical substitutes for human blood—still, in our darkest dreams, monstrous predators hunt us in the night.
Perhaps the tiger who followed our boat was merely curious. Perhaps it just happened to choose the same route as we. Or perhaps the tiger was hunting us. We can’t know. What we do know is that if the tiger had chosen us, our entrails, too, would have been pulled from our bellies, and our bones would have yielded up their marrow. Opening our bodies with its teeth, the tiger exposes the truth that we in the West try to ignore: we are all—chital and boar, frog and fish, astronaut and beggar—made of meat.
The people of Sundarbans, though, understand. But they understand as well that beneath our meat lies the sacred breath of God.
With the help of young Sonaton and two forest guards, Girindra began to build a tiny shrine beneath a piara baen tree at the edge of the water hole at Sudhanyakhali watchtower.
We had come many times to this watchtower. Each visit was a sort of pilgrimage. With Dianne beside me in the crumbling wood and cement structure, perched above the water hole, I had spent many hours silently staring, sweating, waiting. Sometimes we watched wild boar trotting out of the forest: sturdy little army tanks wearing ballerina slippers. We saw delicate chital mince over the pneumatophores; we watched monitor lizards writhe from the water, the tracks of their tails and clawed feet following them. Still we watched and still we waited. I grew increasingly desperate.
For what? For an interpreter to fall from the sky? For Rathin to come bounding out of the forest? For a tree limb to fall on my head, after which I would suddenly understand Bangla?
No less. Wordlessly watching the mangroves, day after day, I awaited a miracle: for Sundarbans to reveal itself to me.
This was part of the reason we had asked Girindra if we might prepare a puja, a worship service, for Sundarbans’ forest gods. We wanted, of course, to show our respect for Girindra and his beliefs. We wanted to see how the forest gods are worshiped. But also, although Dianne is agnostic and I am Christian, we both hoped, secretly, in the back of our minds, that Girindra’s gods could coax a miracle from the forest.
For many mornings we had climbed up the slippery jetty of wrist-thick goran saplings to walk the brick path leading to the watchtower’s cement steps. To protect tourists and staff, a chain-link fence encloses the watchtower and its walkways, separating people from the water hole and the tigers who come here to drink. A metal gate stands at the threshold between these two worlds. Now, with Girindra and Sonaton and the three unarmed forest guards, we went out through that gate, stepping over old tiger tracks at the fence’s perimeter.
Earlier that morning, at a thatch-covered stall of woven bamboo in Jamespur, we had bought some of the sacred items for the puja. From a five-gallon screw-top jar crawling with ants, Girindra had selected batasha, flat, circular white sweets. These, he said, were the favorite sweets of the forest goddess, Bonobibi. He had bought a length of red yarn and two red and gold cellophane necklaces, like cheap Hawaiian leis. Red, the color of our blood, is holy to the Hindus, Girindra explained, and it is a color that very much pleases Daksin Ray, the tiger god.
Girindra also purchased sticks of incense and two small paper wands, each about the size of a bidi, tipped in pink and purple paper and fringed with white string. These Girindra called latu. He said they were for Sha Jungli, Bonobibi’s brother.
Other than these few items we brought nothing. To build the little shrine, the altar, and the images of the gods, Girindra and his friends relied upon the forest. With a machete one of the guards cut several three-foot stakes from a nearby bush. These would become the beams of the small shrine. A frond from a nearby coconut served as the roof for the structure, lashed to the beams with more coconut leaves. The finished shrine would stand about as tall as a squatting child. Girindra gathered mud from the edge of the water hole for the floor. The men went about their work quietly and smoothly. Although the motions were vastly different, their gentle efficiency reminded me of a mother braiding her child’s hair.
About ten minutes after the men began building the shrine, a big male macaque strode out of the forest. Dianne and I remembered the first time we had seen him. After a silent morning waiting on the backless bench in the watchtower with our binoculars plastered to our faces, our vigil had been interrupted by Bengali voices below. We had been horrified to see three forest guards, dressed in lungis, carrying plastic bags, open the gate to the water hole. Through it they strode right to the edge of the water—and there, noisily chatting, they had unpacked shampoo, detergent, and dirty laundry and proceeded, to our astonishment, to wash their hair and their lungis.
“Well,” Dianne had said, “we have just spent four hours motionless in the heat in order to observe three Bengalis do their laundry.”
We almost left right then, so sure were we that the men had irreparably soiled the motionless silence we had so carefully offered the wildlife we hoped to entice. But just as the men finished their washing and passed through the gate, the big male macaque had appeared hesitantly at the edge of the forest. He entered, oddly enough, from the side of the forest closest to where the men had been washing.
At first the pink-faced male approached the water cautiously. He sipped its surface. Then, at some signal we could not detect, the other macaques appeared: smaller males, one with a missing tail tip; females with long nipples, their babies clinging to the light fur of their bellies; scampering youngsters. We counted thirteen monkeys in all.
They drank; the youngsters chased and chatted; two females climbed a tree and plucked tangerine-sized, hairy fruits, biting off chunks of pale yellow flesh and dropping much of it. The first tree the monkeys chose to climb stood only five yards from where the men had just left, even though there were other fruiting trees of the same species nearby, and in fact the monkeys later moved on to feed in these.
Why had they come on the very heels of the guards’ noisy visit? Dianne immediately understood. The clumsy men—four hundred pounds of meat among the three of them—would have provided an easier target and a bigger meal for a tiger than would the small and agile macaques. From the forest the monkeys had been watching to see if the men attracted a tiger. No tiger had appeared to take the easy bait, so the monkeys knew it was safe.
For forty-five minutes the macaques played and fed and chattered all around us, sometimes so close we could see the straw-colored lashes of their pale eyelids. Then they simply dematerialized, dissolving into the forest like salt in the ocean.
Now, as we stood in this clearing by the edge of a tiger forest, we were very glad to see the big male macaque again. Soon he was followed by the rest of the troop. Their appearance showed us that in the opinion of their leader, no tiger was nearby. Had a tiger been lurking, it would have attacked us by now.
The monkeys drank peacefully at the water’s edge, less than fifty yards away, even as Girindra and the other men continued to construct the shrine. All of us—monkeys and people—felt safe.
On the shrine’s floor of mud, Girindra constructed three mud platforms. On each of these he placed a round ball the size of a baby doll’s head. Each mound was then topped with a leaf, like a hat.
The men then washed in the pond and ceremonially purified Dianne and me by sprinkling its water on our heads. A guard lit two sticks of incense and placed them before the two front “pillars” of the shrine.
Girindra laid a shallow carpet of shiny green piara baen leaves in front of the three mounds. A guard strung the two stubby pieces of latu onto the red string we had bought at Jamespur, then hung it inside the roof of the shrine, the latu dangling like two lanterns. The red and gold lei was placed, carefully and with great reverence, to encircle the three mud balls. On each leaf-topped mound a white sweet was placed, with two for the center one. The bag of remaining sweets was placed inside the shrine.
Everything was prepared: the shrine was ready for its occupants. Girindra spoke softly in Bangla, invoking the gods to enter the balls of mud. Glare poured from the sun like milk from a pitcher.
In much of Western tradition, it is said that Yahweh conjured us from the dust, but here in Sundarbans the relationship is more mutual. Ordinary men conjure gods from the mud.
Hands flat on the ground, Girindra bowed before his gods.
As they wander a magical landscape, even the saints can become confused.
Hindu mythology relates the story of Markandeya, an ancient sage. For thousands of years the sturdy old man happily roams the ideal world inside the body of the sleeping Vishnu. But Vishnu is sleeping with his lips slightly parted; Markandeya unwittingly slips out of the mouth of the god and plunges into the sea upon which the god floats.
Markandeya is horrified to find himself drowning in the dark waters of the cosmic ocean. Hindu teachings tell us the water, too, is Vishnu, as is Annata, the endless serpent upon whom the floating god reclines. Yet to Markandeya the sea seems not the fullness on which a god rests, but nothingness. The world as he has known it is gone. Did it ever exist at all?
But then the forlorn saint spies the giant glowing form of the sleeping god, floating in the waters. Just as Markandeya is about to ask where he is, Vishnu seizes him and swallows him.
The saint finds himself again inside the body of the god—as easily and mysteriously as dreams enter our sleep, as food enters our mouths, as breath enters our lungs.
The universe, the mystics tell us, is more permeable than it seems. The boundaries between man and animal, ghosts and gods are only an illusion, an artifact of the Maya-spell masking the identity of opposites.
All breath sings of the miracle of the permeable world. With each inspiration, it is said, we make the sound “ham”; our exhalations speak “sa.” “Hamsa,” we breathe, pronouncing the word for gander—a bird that swims on the surface of the water yet also flies through the air—the mount of Brahma, the four-faced creator-god who springs from the lotus growing from Vishnu’s navel. Spoken separately, “ham” means I; “sa” means “this.” “Sa-ham,” we breathe, proclaiming “This am I.” With every breath—as we gather the oxygen that reddens our blood—we speak the name of God alongside our own. With every breath, we draw inside our bodies the inseparable spirit of the Absolute; “the divine essence,” writes Heinrich Zimmer, “abides with the individual like the gander gliding on the water.”
Here in Sundarbans, where the sea penetrates and enfolds the land and the land penetrates and enfolds the sea, boundaries dissolve easily, like mud in water. Here fish pulled from water dry to the color of sunrise; here the tips of trees put forth birds as well as buds; and so here easily do men made of meat call gods to enter balls of mud.
Into our presence Girindra called three gods: Daksin Ray, the tiger god of the jungle; Sha Jungli, the club-wielding warrior, protector of men; and Bonobibi herself, the forest goddess.
Each of us bowed before them, one after the other. Girindra spoke softly in Bengali. Kneeling, he touched his right hand to the forehead, the heart, the top of the head—a sign of reverence we then imitated. Then, from the carpet of leaves in front of the gods, each man chose a leaf and selected two sweets from the bag. Each leaf, with a cargo of sweets, was floated like a raft on the water at the drinking hole. These were retrieved, and the now-moist batasha crumbled over each person’s head. Then we ate the rest of the sweets, for they had become holy. We swallowed them as easily as Vishnu swallowed Markandeya.
Girindra and Sonaton went back to Mabisaka, and Dianne and I returned to the watchtower to collect our things.
At the shop that morning Girindra had bought two cellophane necklaces, but had used only one in the puja. I wondered what he would do with the other. When Dianne and I returned to Mabisaka, we found it garlanded about her bow. Six batasha were laid out in a line like buttons along her red bowsprit, and we could see the remains of a stick of incense wedged into a seam in the wood.
“Bonobibi, Daksin Ray, Sha Jungli—have they come to you ever?” I asked Girindra later.
“Yesterday, Bonobibi come,” he told me. “Sleep-time, Bonobibi, I luke.”
Girindra has seen many things in his dreams: gods in the form of tigers, tigers in the form of ghosts, ghosts in the form of animals. In his dreams he has been chased by fantastic creatures that are not found in real jungles or even in mythology. He has traveled to parts of the jungle he has never seen. Some of his dreams, he realizes, are merely sleep-plays, without significant meaning; others, he is convinced, are visions. And some have been dark and frightening.
Girindra could not tell me then about these visions. The only dream simple enough to accommodate our shared language was this: in the forest Bonobibi came to him, glowing like the moon, and took him in her arms like a mother.
After the puja Girindra seemed visibly bolder. The very next day he decided to take us again to Bagna, the “tiger-infested” area he’d previously feared to explore.
“Bagh kothai?” I joked on our way. “Tiger, where?”
“Shekane bagh ache”—“The tiger is there,” he assured. But, he continued in English, “You no luke!”
When we arrived at Bagna, we met with forest ranger M. S. Hazra, who produced an armed guard to accompany us into the small channels of Jhingakhali Block (“Very tiger-infested area,” he promised).
As if on a razor’s edge, we cruised the waterways, hoping to see a tiger. But in the entire two-hour trip, for the first time since we had journeyed to Sundarbans, we saw no mammals at all.
The guard clung to his ancient Russian-made rifle all afternoon, as if a tiger might leap at us any minute. Dianne and I stared into the forest, trying to make our eyes into x-rays. Bagna’s shores are thick with thorny fronds of hental. In these areas the scrub grows so dense the deer are said to get caught in the thickets. The patterns etched by the black voids between the palm leaves look exactly like the stripes of a tiger.
How can a four-hundred-pound tiger hide behind a hole? How can a forest so green camouflage the tiger’s blazing orange? These forests form a dark hall of mirrors, each reflecting its opposite, where spaces hide bulk and orange mirrors green, where violence appears unexpectedly beautiful, and beauty turns violent and strange.
All afternoon we saw nothing, yet we returned with deeply unsettled souls.
Listen for the voice of the Absolute: “This am I,” sighs the moon-driven surge of the sea; “This am I,” promises the white egret in flight; “This am I,” says the sun’s gold mirrored on the water.
Like Markandeya wandering the ideal world inside Vishnu, you may see peace and power perfected in the ebb and flow of Sundarbans. The mangroves give up their dead leaves to the water with careless cheer. They do not flutter and struggle in the wind like the autumn leaves of northern forests, but detach of their own volition and plunge directly into the water, as if the water, not the branches, were their home. And in the water the leaves indeed enter new incarnations, for here they are transformed, recycled like the souls of men and animals in the great wheel of rebirth.
Even in the mud you may see the glory of the greatest gods. Or you may instead see an orgy of breeding and feeding, in the twine and tangle of the stilt roots, in the mud that greedily devours your skin the way a gourmand sucks a duck bone. And in the boat, with the roll of the water rising beneath you like desire, the sea seems an open mouth, forever licking the land, forever lusting, forever hungry.
In this spirit-drenched tiger forest, the gods are as close as breath, as alien as dreams; what seems at first obscenely obvious may, the next moment, sink from sight or transform itself to its opposite. Looking into these forests is like glancing absently at your own hand and finding in its place a claw.
One morning, as we were heading to Jamespur to buy coconuts, we heard the thud and tap of drums and the nasal call of a flute. On the spine of the mud embankment separating the river from the village, we saw a crowd gathering in festive clothes. Girindra told us it was a wedding. We stopped to watch the couple exchange vows.
Everyone seemed to be watching a beautiful woman wearing a red veil. Draped in a red and gold sari, her tall, sinuous body writhed seductively to the notes of the flute. The men around her grinned broadly. As we approached, we looked at her more closely: she was wearing pink pancake makeup, her eyes outlined in kohl; the long black hair was a wig, and her little round breasts were false. She was a man dressed as a woman. Later, back in Calcutta, Kushal told me the dancer was probably a eunuch. Eunuchs, he said, are also often called upon to bless that other great public celebration of sex, the birth of a first child.
As the dancer twirled to the music, most people were ignoring the three-foot by four-foot palanquin sitting on the dirt, although it had been carefully decorated with crepe paper flowers, colored newsprint, and paper and foil butterflies. We looked inside, and found there, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jack, the bride. You could tell she had been crying for a very long time. Now there were no sobs left, only tears. She looked to be about twelve years old.
She was not a pretty girl; she had a severe overbite and a boxy body that her billowing pink wedding dress did not hide; her red and gold bangles only accentuated the thickness of her wrists. But, to the merry assembly her beauty was in her dark eyes glazed with tears—the height of feminine modesty.
It is considered respectable for the Bengali bride to cry: she is about to leave her home and her village and all she knows and loves, to live with a man she almost certainly did not choose and may never have even seen before. Here, as in most of India, marriages are arranged by the parents of bride and groom. The depth of her sorrow reflects respect for her parents’ wishes. “Tomorrow I am going to a new country, where my relatives cannot come,” goes one Bengali bride’s song, translated by Katy Gardner in Songs at the River’s Edge. “They will carry me off in my death casket, and I will wear a shroud for my gown.”
The groom never looked at the girl he was taking as his wife. The thin young man, just old enough to sprout the soft shadow of a moustache, seemed as terrified as she. Standing stiffly in a neat, white Nehru-collared shirt and cream-colored pants, he was dwarfed beneath a tall, pointed hat, which appeared to be encrusted with ivory carvings. (Later, at a little shop in Jamespur, we saw the unadorned wedding hat for sale; it was made of newspaper.)
The bride got out of her palanquin and stood beside him; they joined pinkie fingers and stared at the mud at their feet while words were said over them in Bengali. Then they entered the palanquin and, lifted on the shoulders of their bearers, riding on the good wishes of the gathered crowd, were carried to the wedding boat. Little boys shot off firecracker rockets, drum-beats swelled and the notes of the flute twirled, the boat’s motor putted to life, and the couple and the wedding party floated off upon the waters like a sweet batasha on a floating leaf. The bride, still crying, waved to Dianne and me. We wondered later if perhaps she thought we were visiting dignitaries who might somehow save her.
Dianne later discovered that someone in the crowd had unbuttoned a snap on her vest pocket. Had the pickpocket chosen to unzip her money belt, he could have stolen hundreds of rupees, some American dollars, a priceless American passport; instead he had gotten Dianne’s little spray can of Mace. We imagined the thief’s initial disappointment. Then we imagined his alarm if he tried out the stolen item to discover whether it was, as he probably assumed, perfume—or breath spray. We laughed at this small imagined act of violence; this was storybook justice.
It is the violence of innocents that takes your breath away, for it is always unexpected; one day we watched it unfold at our feet. When Girindra was taking us home from a day in the forest, he stopped two boatmen and bought crabs from them in exchange for two of Dianne’s cigarettes. From the shallow aluminum pot in the dark hold of the little country boat, the older of the two men, his head wrapped in a gamcha, his feet wrinkled and callused like an elephant’s, selected two fat, greenish crabs from the mass of wind-milling pincers. He set them on the deck of Mabisaka. “Lady and gentleman crab,” Girindra announced; he knew because he had once worked as a crab fisherman.
Immediately the male grabbed the female by the eyestalk and pulled off her eye. With his other claw he crushed through the shell of her head. At the same moment, with pincers like pliers, she ripped his right claw from its socket, her eyestalk still clutched in his chitinous grip. Then gentle Girindra, seeing our afternoon snack about to self-destruct, grabbed the crabs, snapped off all their claws and legs, and dumped them, still living, into the water bucket.
Listen for the voice of the Absolute: This am I.
We were returning to Sajnekhali, waiting for the sunset to spill across the sky, when we saw the tiger.
We had spent the whole day on Mabisaka, exploring the channels. We had seen a particularly big crocodile, perhaps twenty-one feet long. We had seen pigs and deer. We had passed several poles marking tiger accidents, and again Girindra had tried to tell me what had happened there; again we had concluded our frustrating conversation by apologizing to one another:
“I very sorry not full English have.”
“I very sorry I not full Bangla have.”
“I very sad.”
“I very sad, too.”
Dianne had spent much of the day trying to photograph kingfishers. They endlessly play tag with boats; one will burst from its perch, zoom down the river, an arrow of turquoise and white; it alights on a branch overhanging the river, waits for the boat to catch up to it, then flies off again. “I’ll get that little bastard yet!” Dianne would vow, letting loose a laugh like a pirate. And then she would squint through her lens and fold up her legs and elbows on the deck—and the shutter would click just as the bird again left its perch.
Girindra cooked us some curried fish for lunch that day. For a later snack, on his clay stove we boiled up a packet of freeze-dried Maritime Pasta Supreme, a treat I had brought from America. Sonaton didn’t like it, but once Girindra added green chilies, he pronounced the dish “very nice.”
Normally, Girindra ate with his hand, an act of mundane yet alarming grace, a ballet of the fingers and palm. I remembered the first time I had watched our friend Hasna eat this way: with her index finger she would pick up a pad of salt, then with finger bent inward, dab the curry; and then, with thumb and all fingers pressing the food into her palm, she would knead the fish, rice, and dahl until her whole hand, even her gold rings, shone with grease. Eating with the hand adds to the sensory experience of food, Hasna explained. “A Bengali would never dream of eating a traditional dish with knife and fork,” she told us; “it wouldn’t taste the same.” Girindra must have followed this reasoning about Maritime Pasta Supreme; to more fully experience this, his first taste of “American” food, he ate with the spoon he used to stir the dahl.
After lunch we relaxed. Dianne packed away her big lens, Girindra did the dishes. Dianne and I sat on the white bench on Mabisaka’s foredeck watching the afternoon light fade, waiting for the sun to melt on the water. We rounded a bend in the river.
Sonaton saw the tiger first. His arm shot forward as he pointed, and he shouted its name as vehemently as a person in a flaming house would yell “FIRE!” “BAGH!” he cried, and then, for our benefit, “TIGER!”
For a second it looked like a rock: a roundish, shadowed object in the middle of the 130-foot-wide river, a rim of white water foaming at its edge. But the rock was moving. The rock was a head—the face of a tiger—and the tiger was swimming across the river, at a right angle to the path of the Mabisaka.
The tiger’s body was so wet it looked black in the water. But the head was dry, and impossibly colored with flame and coal and cloud. How can any creature look like this? It seemed impossibly big, impossibly powerful; it seemed at least ten feet long. The tiger didn’t look at us. To the tiger we were nothing; all that mattered was crossing the river, reaching whatever was drawing it to the other side.
We could see the white spots on the back of the ears. Within ten seconds of our first sighting it, the tiger reached the bank. It climbed out onto the mud, water sheeting off its fur, off its long, curved tail, and slipped into the forest.
Every day I had watched and waited for this moment, for this miracle, waited for Sundarbans to appear, like a god in a vision, in the form of a tiger.
But the tiger’s magic was as impenetrable as the forest itself. It took the animal less than two seconds to climb from the water and disappear. Seamlessly it melted into the tangled mangroves—without shaking its coat, without rustling a leaf, without bending a branch. Weightless and bulkless, invisible as breath, the tiger evaporated into the forest.