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The Butchers of Bengal
GQ, January 2009 GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN in the Sundarbans, West Bengal “THE TIGERS are in there,” the man at the tiller says, pointing into the mangroves that overhang the deck of the boat as it noses along the edge of the inlet. The dappled sunlight plays on pale green and yellow leaves, reflecting off the water, casting shadows among the branches, breaking up the shape of anything moving among the trees. Somewhere out of sight, 500lb of heavily muscled tiger is picking its way through the forest, looking for dinner. “In there,” the boatman says again, pointing urgently, but fear makes every shadow look like a stripe. You don’t see them until they are upon you, the fishermen say: they arrive as if from nowhere, a blur of orange and black. Fangs sink into flesh, claws pierce the skin. The last thing you see is the look of horror on the faces of your friends as the tiger drags you backwards into the depths of the forest. That should have been Naren Sardar’s fate. By the time the 56-year-old realised what was happening, he was pinned beneath the tiger, looking into a face from his nightmares. Toppling backwards into the water, he could feel its breath on his face. A paw caught him across the side of the head, dislocating his jaw and knocking out his teeth. Desperate now, he swung his foot upwards, as hard as he could. He felt it connect somewhere between its hind legs. He grins a toothless grin: “I kicked him in the bichi...in the balls”. Naren Sardar lived; many do not. Tigers and humans have always existed uneasily alongside each other in the Sundarbans, the jungle that spans the border between West Bengal and Bangladesh. Now though it is worse, much worse; suddenly, it seems, there are reports of tigers everywhere. From the villages that line the banks of the rivers that cut through the jungle come stories of fishermen snatched, of tigers venturing into houses, of man-eaters on the prowl. Rising water levels and a cyclone that battered Bangladesh at the end of 2007 have pushed the tigers ever closer to the people who are trying to scratch a living from the forest and the Royal Bengal tiger, perhaps more than most, has developed a taste for human flesh. The boat nudges through the channel between the mangroves. “The tigers may be further in because it is high tide,” the boatman says, offering a crumb of comfort. “Normally there are crocodiles here too. They lie on the banks,” he says, pointing to the water’s edge, preparing to snatch the crumb away. “Now they are down there,” he says, gesturing at the water around what suddenly seems a very small and fragile boat. “Beneath us.” This boat is about 30ft long and narrow, black in colour with cracked and heavily weathered planks for a deck. It smells faintly of fish. Chugging out across the Matla river from the village of Deulbari towards the mangroves on the far shore, it passes several small fishing boats. Grey clouds pile up in the sky, interspersed with patches of blue. The boatman points the craft into the inlet and runs about 15ft from the shore, then cuts the engine and lets it drift closer so that some of the men can try to grab the large fruits hanging down from the Sundari trees. There are many such channels leading into the deeper forest. A boat carrying men and women rolls in the small waves at the edge of the mangroves. From the shore, a man wades out through the shallow water, chest deep, carrying a basket. Inside there are a couple of dozen green and grey mangrove crabs, about three or four inches across the shell, fighting each other. The fisherman puts in a handful of mangrove leaves and they calm down. The crabs will fetch between 80 and 120 rupees per kg in the market and the fishermen can expect to catch no more than five kg between them in a day. It costs 400 rupees just to hire the boat, but the truth is there is precious little else they can do. Fatik Haldar thought it worth the risk, though he was only eight when his own father was killed by a tiger while collecting honey in the forest. In a way, Fatik was lucky; at least the tiger that came for him let him go. Now 35, bare chested and dressed in a dirty red check lungi wrapped round his waist, he sits at the bow of the boat. His right shoulder is scarred from the tiger’s fangs; on his back, the skin is only just beginning to heal over the claw marks. It was 10.30 in the morning, about two months ago, when he and five other men stopped their boat in a creek. Fatik had climbed into the river; suddenly he felt a great weight on his shoulders, pushing him down into the water. “I looked over my shoulder and at that moment it bit me,” he says. “I was screaming for help but none of the others came. I locked one of my legs in the mud and dug my hand in as well so the tiger could not pull me away. “But I started to get tired and it dragged me to solid ground. I was struggling and then I thought of the goddess Bono Bibi [the tiger goddess worshipped everywhere in the Sundarbans] and at that moment the tiger let go.” Until that moment, he says, he had not felt the pain; now he was in agony. Yet he is still one of the lucky ones. In Deulbari, the widows have gathered in the communal hall. There are 29 widows packed into the long, dark room, from a village of 4,000 people, They listen and nod as the stories pour out. “Don’t go,” Minati Haldar told her husband Swapan when he said he was off to the forest with two other men in search of crabs. “He said ‘Look after the children, I will be back in five or six days’. I told him I am always worried about the dangers. I told him ‘Don’t go’. But he said he had to because it was the only thing he could do.” He left first thing on a Saturday morning in January. His companions returned with the body of the 35-year-old the following night. Like the others, Swapan had no inkling that the tiger was there until it pounced. It locked its jaws around his head and pulled him backwards into the forest. By the time the others found him, he was already dead. His 30 year old wife must bring up their three children alone. “Somehow we have to live here,” she says, looking down, toying with her sari. There is nothing to mark out Deulbari as any different from the other villages clinging to the shores of the Sundarbans. Approached through vivid green rice paddies dotted with vibrant pink water lilies, it is a village of roughly constructed houses, some with corrugated iron roofs, others just straw, bleached by the sun. Yet in the past 10 years, more than 50 people from this one village have been attacked by tigers, and the people who live there say the attacks have risen dramatically this year, 15 so far. The ranks of the widows are swelling. Even inside the village they are not safe, as 47-year-old Ashutosh Dhali discovered to his cost in February. Standing on the jetty that leads down to the water, he pulls up his kurta to display the mangled mess that was his thigh. The tigress, well over 8ft long, must have crossed the river and sneaked into the village some time during the day; it had been dark for hours when her eyes, glowing green in the torchlight, gave her away, hiding in bushes by the side of the road. The villagers grabbed burning torches and gave chase, shouting loudly and driving her up into the branches of a tree. Driven on by fear and anger, they encircled the tree, jabbing at the maddened animal with the burning sticks and spreading nets on the ground below in the hope that they could entangle her when she fell. Instead, when the tigress finally dropped to the ground, she simply tore the nets apart and made off into the darkness. That night, no-one slept. People locked their doors and clustered together. Everyone had a burning bamboo stick and some were beating drums, hoping it would be enough to keep the tigress away. Someone, though, was thinking straight. In the town of Canning, Gopal Chandra Tanti, the forestry department’s top tiger catcher, took the call. He dressed quickly, collected his rifle and pistol and summoned his team. Clambering into a speedboat, they set course for Deulbari, bouncing across the water in the dark. They found the tigress in the morning, dozing in a field. Slowly, she sat up, shaking herself. Eyeing the hundreds of people who had gathered to watch, she let out a roar and started to run backwards and forwards before crashing through the nets they had strung out again to catch her, and bolted back up another palm tree. This time, there seemed to be nowhere for her to go. Mr Tanti carefully assembled the dart, screwing a plastic flight into the base of the aluminium tube, pouring in the ketamil he hoped would tranquillise the animal and attaching the needle. He pushed it into the breach of the rifle, rammed in a charge and snapped it shut. Taking aim, he fired. And waited. One minute, two, the tiger becoming drowsier, three, four, five, six. The villagers tied ropes to her legs and hauled her down, but still she was not finished. Rearing up, she yanked the cords from the hands of those holding them. All, that is, except Ashutosh. “The others started to run but I had the rope wrapped round my hand,” he says. Backing away, he stumbled into the water, but the tigress was on him in a flash. “I almost got away, but the tiger clamped its jaws on my leg,” he explains, looking down at the wound ruefully. Desperate to get free, he says he did not feel the pain at first. “All I could think was to keep eye contact with it. The tiger was looking back at me. I was pushing its head back. I pushed it twice. There was blood in the water.” Suddenly, the tiger let go and the pain kicked in. Someone put him in a van and drove him to hospital. It was 40 days before he was allowed out. Back in the village, the tiger had finally succumbed to the effects of the ketamil. Bundled into a cage, she was taken back into the deep forest to be released. Back in his office in Canning, Mr Tanti fiddles with the Swiss-made rifle he has used to tranquillise dozens of tigers since he faced his first in 1985. He is 54, dressed in a crisp yellow shirt, hair combed neatly. “I am the best. No-one in India is better than me,” he says. It was true once, but not any more. Thirty years of facing down tigers have taken their toll; 30 years and 64 tigers. His nerves are shot. He still remembers his first, a female staring back at him from the bamboo bushes in the village of Hiranmoypur. He lay down and tried to aim. “It was my first time and I was very afraid,” he says. The tiger watched him, poised to spring. He handed a torch to his assistant and told him to move around to distract the animal. “Then I shot her. The dart hit her left forearm and then we waited. After 10 minutes she lay down. But then she rolled into the pond. I went in after her. She was still roaring. I held her head and her whiskers were touching my body. Everyone else was running around in terror.” Too many tigers, too many nights spent peering into the darkness; he tries to raise the rifle to his shoulder, but his hands betray him and the barrel droops down onto his desk. If the Sundarbans needed men like Mr Tanti before, it needs them more than ever now. Official figures show about a dozen deaths in tiger attacks in the past year and a similar number of incidents in which tigers have strayed into villages, but news reports of attacks and the villagers’ own stories suggests the real figures are significantly higher. In Deulbari alone, they say they have had six deaths in the last year. No-one knows for sure how many tigers there are in the forest; the last count in 2004 estimated 274 on the Indian side and a similar number over the border. Attempts to count them since then have been unsuccessful. The boat wheels away from the edge of the mangroves and heads back over the open water. The forest recedes and Deulbari comes into view. For today at least, the tigers are staying inside the forest. But no-one doubts they will be back. “We have always lived with tigers. It is part and parcel of life here,” says 61-year-old Badak Sardar, Deulbari’s former schoolteacher. “This conflict will continue because the man-eaters are looking for humans. Once they have the taste of human flesh, they will always look for it.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
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