It is three in the afternoon and a breeze whips my hair as I stand behind the prow of the Project Tiger patrol boat. I am making my way along the blue-green waters of the Netidhopani river in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve. It can get surprisingly bright on the water in the Sundarbans – even with sunshades on.
About 250 m ahead of our vessel, I spot a floating log. We are moving against the current about 30 m from shore, I watch the log in a disinterested way, waiting for it to drift closer to our boat. That never happens.
Instead, I begin to notice that it is moving at a 90 degree angle to us… and to the powerful current. Strange! At a distance of 150 m, I peer through my binoculars and see a small round shape – certainly not a log. It takes me a full 10 seconds to realise that a childhood dream has come true. I am in the Sundarbans, and there before me, is a wild tiger.
No one sees tigers in the Sundarbans. Everyone knows you come here for the experience, or to birdwatch, or just to escape urbania. Yet, against all probability, there she is. The cat's head is to our left perhaps 500 m from the far shore. She is headed straight for the far bank but then, to my utter surprise, she turns and begins to swim back in the direction from whence she came.
Everyone is now on deck and there is excitement on the boat. I shout instructions to the boatman to maintain a distance of at least 30 m from the cat, and yell at him not to cut off her path to ‘get a better look’. But the cat has other ideas. As our boat comes to a near-halt, it begins to swim back towards us with the current! She approaches as close as 10 m to our left, glancing up at us just once before heading for the shore from behind our vessel.
Tigers are very powerful swimmers. I can imagine her huge, paddle-like paws propelling her forward underwater. Her heart must be fit to burst from the exertion. Effectively avoiding a second Project Tiger vessel positioned between our boat and the shore, she heads for the mudbank. The tigress struggles momentarily in the slippery mud, and then bounds, tail up (which is how I was able to conclude she was a she!) into the mangroves and was swallowed by her emerald forest.
The whole episode takes no more than three or four minutes, during which time I am granted momentary access into the life of one of the world's most secretive, most threatened predators. I have seen tigers in the wild, but for some reason that I cannot quite explain, this experience leaves me marked for life. I have always known that the tiger was the keeper of the swamps. It will forever remain my master.
Experiencing the inheritance
Like nearly everyone who visits the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, I began my trip at Sonakhali near the Matla river. I then went past Gosaba to reach Sajnekhali, at the confluence of the Pirkhali and Gomdi rivers. Here, I took a quick walk through the orientation centre, and an even quicker climb up to the watchtower before boarding the Project Tiger patrol boat that was to be my home for the next few days.
We cast off late in the afternoon and ever so often, we would pull as close to the shore as the mud would allow, getting a better look at wild boar digging for roots and chital and mud-caked macaques gorging on the fruit of keora trees. Gopal Tanti, Assistant Research Officer with the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve casually mentioned that he had even seen fish eating fallen keora fruit.
The Sundarbans is a birder's paradise and before daylight faded I found myself identifying birds, comparing their beaks with the foods they sought. Curlews and whimbrels dug deep into the mud for crustaceans, sandpipers picked off smaller creatures from closer to the surface, Brown-winged Kingfishers waited patiently for a fish or crab to come within striking distance before swooping down on them.
On the mudbanks, crocodiles, monitor lizards, mudskippers and fiddler crabs revealed themselves from time to time. A snake painstakingly made its way towards an assemblage of mudskippers, but was thwarted at the very last moment when the fish, specially adapted for locomotion on land, darted away.
This utterly fragile, strange and magical ecosystem is geologically new and still evolving. Rivers and tides circulate nutrients like a chef might a great soup, with nothing wasted, as living creatures join the benthic flora in metabolising everything organic.
It’s a magical ecosystem and scientists tell us the Sundarbans is probably one of the world's most vital mechanisms to counter the impact of climate change because mangroves colonise new soils washed down by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra almost as soon as such soils rise as land above water.
The new mangroves sequester carbon from the air and store it for extended periods. A similar service – if it were offered by scientists, or businessmen – would cost a fortune in taxes and would probably not be even half as efficient.
So the question arises: “Why is India not doing more to protect the Sundarbans and other natural ecosystems?” Neither ‘my tiger’ nor I have an answer to that one.
