Crossings
A LITHE, khaki-clad "forest guide" jumped into the back of our safari jeep in Madhya Pradesh. "Good morning, welcome to Pench," chirped a distinctly feminine voice! Astounded, we turned in our seats to find a young girl ("I am Nisha") with a disarming smile, rubbing her palms to beat the chill. Even in the searing summer heat, dawn temperatures can be freezing.
As veteran riders to the forest, we are familiar with guides, sometimes gun-toting guards, accompanying safari jeeps, but this was the first time ever that we saw a woman in this role. Ten girls, mostly belonging to the Gond community, have been recruited on an experimental basis in a hitherto male bastion comprising 70 guides. In the heat and dust of the rugged terrain, amalgamating with the excitement of sighting big game, it is the guide who alerts the driver to fresh pugmarks and alarm calls. When forest patrol guards catch a safari driver speeding, it is the guide who is pulled up: "Why didn't you reprimand the driver or ask him to maintain the 20 kmph limit?"
With their keen eye and alert auditory nerves, the guides can detect the faintest movements in the forest's camouflaged settings - "there's a leopard on that rock to your left" or "see that crested serpent eagle on the top branch of the gum tree". All of this would escape the visiting tourist, even those that arrive armed with binoculars and zoom cameras.
With our tendency to stereotype, my expectations of sighting big game in the company of an inexperienced girl guide were dismal. But barely had we ventured 500 metres into Pench's grassy bare teak terrain, than Nisha asked the driver to stop and began to tune intently into alarm calls. The langurs were barking (as they do whenever they spy a predator, as opposed to their normal whoops) from a tree to our right.
"Maybe it's BMW. Or could be Neelam...," Nisha told our driver Jyotish, referring to tigers active in that zone. Tigers are given names by the foresters. I was curious about the nomenclature; she explained that the stripes on this male studied backwards appeared in a formation that looked like BMW! I didn't get to know about Neelam because at that very moment, there was a ruffling in the undergrowth and a pair of leopards leapt the span of our path in sequence, like two flying jaguars.
Having grown up on tiger tales at my conservator grandfather's knee, I had assumed that the rifle-wielding male was the ultimate hero, the fearless shikari who could save villagers from a maneater by standing in a ditch covered with leaves to catch the big cat unawares, or sit on a machan all night poised to pull the trigger on behalf of the weak-kneed British commissioner nurturing dreams of posing with his big cat "trophy".
Somewhere over the years, my loyalty shifted from man to animal, the sighting of wildlife gladdening the heart no end. Even the prospect of arduous journeys, minimal facilities and gruelling safaris (the temperatures in central India can be extreme) no longer deter us when the call of the wild gathers momentum.
To reach the Turiya gate entrance to Pench, we travelled 82 kilometres from Nagpur along the state highway (the four-lane construction in parts making navigation quite perilous) to Khawasa, with its saffron buntings and bustle, and then turned left for a 12-kilometre ride through the forest's buffer zone to reach our remote destination.
It was in this back of beyond that we stumbled upon a bunch of young motorcycle-revving village girls, who have not just mastered the fauna vocabulary for their demanding job (given the professional hazards of dealing with the unexpected) but mustered the courage to speak in English.
Women are the pivot of tribal communities, but to see mainstream society try to empower them is truly remarkable. Banish the thought of catcalls, these forest guides are set to be a roaring success!
Sudipta Bhattacharjee
