He motioned for us to be quiet, and slipped off his shoes. We took off ours too, acutely feeling the red gravel. The jungle floor had changed — drying leaves, to grass, to gravel. The evening sky took on a reddish tinge behind the large, tattered teak and Coromandel ebony leaves. Many trees were bare, and the evenings cold.

I’d twitched uncomfortably as we passed an enormous termite mound, reminded of the little insects that had got into our clothes earlier in the day. Thankfully the itching had stopped — insects, or maybe ticks, had invaded us as we worked deeper inside the bamboo patch earlier in the day, holding cans of red paint and marking a grid on the bamboo for an animal census. I’d spent the afternoon determinedly washing in the little bathroom in our cottage, scrubbing them away until my skin was raw and itch-free.

We were in the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, my friend and I, having arrived by train and bus, without a camera or our own transport, and had no expectation of seeing a tiger. The fact that this was the largest national park in Maharashtra was incidental. We just wanted to live in a jungle for a couple of days — a wish-fulfilment, a slice of adventure before we knuckled down really into working lives. We’d only be here a couple of days. That’s all the time my boss would buy of my sudden and mysterious illness, anyway.

We’d bumped into Satyajit* the evening before, a researcher doing work on mammal parasites, and Sujan*, a tracker working on Project Tiger, and talked. I, still loopy from travel-sickness pills for the long bus ride we’d taken, jerked my head up at periodic intervals and tried to look awake, while my friend volunteered our services for marking grids for animal census the following day.

After the grid-marking, Satyajit asked us to meet them at the forest reserve canteen in the evening. An evening walk in the forest would be just the thing after an afternoon of work. We might even, he said, see some wildlife; then added worriedly that we should never, ever, walk on our own.

Scrubbed and slightly irritable — I’d had enough of the jungle and insects already — here we were, walking again.

I was acutely aware of always having missed more than I had seen. I did see langurs, shyer than I had always thought, deer, wary and still, and a kingfisher that lived near our cottage. Earlier that afternoon, Satyajit had stood, paint can in hand, and had pointed near the water. My friend and he kept looking in that direction, and I saw nothing until the log we’d been looking at moved from the sunny patch, curled its tail and plopped into the water.

Satyajit, Sujan and my friend talked in low tones and I trailed behind, slowly waking up to how lovely the evening light looked, when Sujan had put a finger to his lips, and had stopped everyone on their tracks. He bent down, then looked around, and took off his shoes. We moved away from the path, and now had to climb a tree.

I looked up, appalled — I had no idea how to climb. We were pushed and pulled, and the four of us finally settled on two trees. I settled on a fork high up, and just like that, I went from faintly testy to transfixed.

This was what the entire trip had been leading to – this view. I sat like a large, ungainly bird on a tree, a sea of trees stretched in whichever direction I looked, green – mile upon mile of green – and brown; some were bare, wearing twig-crowns. The jungle seemed to stretch to the edge of the world, as far as I could see, the red sky turning purple, then black, the forest floor distant. And then the moon rose, enormous, yellow and gibbous, and the crickets and frogs went mad with sound. There were the occasional yips and cries I couldn’t identify.

The moon made skeletons of trees, black silhouettes that stood out into a fantastical landscape. It was easy now to see where tales and stories of ghosts and women who lived in little clay huts, and demons with emerald hearts and princes who turned to swans came from. They must have come from cold evenings beside a fire, and from days and nights like these.

I don’t remember if the utter absence of forest chatter registered then, or if someone mentioned it later. But without warning, Sujan’s torch cut a beam and shone, into the forest. There, on the forest floor, like an actor in a spotlight, was a tiger. It looked coldly at the source of the light and stood, its head turned towards us.

I froze on my tree, clutching at the branch I leaned on a little more desperately, breathless with the beauty of the thing. The pelt was orange, bright and alive, and I could only imagine the power behind those muscles, the massive legs and paws, the long tail. It stood like that for a few moments, its eyes appearing red for a moment as the light caught them. Maybe Blake had seen something like this before he wrote Tyger! Tyger! burning bright . Of his fearful symmetry.

It turned its head forward, and as silently as it had stopped, was walking again, away from us, towards the direction we had come from, and then away from the path. The beam followed it until the tiger was swallowed in the trees.

Some time later, when our heartbeats returned to normal and when it was deemed safe to descend, we scrambled and scraped and were helped down the trees before we burst into excited talk, all at once, tourists, researcher and tiger tracker alike.

I would like to think I remember what exactly we talked about; but beyond the fact that one of them thought it was a male and the other, a female, and someone wondered aloud if tigers climb trees, I don’t remember much.

The two men of science sat on their haunches and looked quickly at pugmarks, their arguments continuing about toe lengths, hand spans, and what Jim Corbett had said.

We made our way out towards the outskirts, stopping to look at an abandoned den of wild dogs, two torches lit now, jumping, circular shapes on the path, past the dark shapes of trees, and the occasional eerie ghost tree, its bark pale and peeling. I wondered what I could possibly write of my day in my journal, or in a letter home to my family, how I could write about what the day had been.

Many years have passed, and Tadoba Tiger Reserve now rivals Corbett National Park in the Himalayan foothills for showing tigers to tourists, packed jeep safaris and tiger sightings.

I think of that tiger often — I thought of it when I saw a panther in an old mansion on the Konkan coast, the lady of the house telling me her mother-in-law had shot it, and as I left her house, asking if Asian cheetahs weren’t extinct in India. I thought of it when I read what Robert Macfarlane had written — that tigers are ghost species, the last of their lines, with little hope of them surviving in the wild. I read of poachers, stripping skin and concealing bones in sacks in the forest, leaving them there, faintly rotting, to be collected at leisure; about skins being sold for the equivalent of five kilos of rice, about new methods for curing skin so they fit in smaller spaces.

I hope my tiger has evaded traps, wires, a bullet to the head. If my tiger is alive, I hope it is hunting well.

*Names changed on request

Suhasini Kamble is a Mumbai-based freelance writer

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