No B2 Me Here

In winter, night steals upon you like a tiger. Before you know it, you are enveloped in black. It is the darkest possible experience. Power goes off at 11 in the night and comes back only the following noon. (That’s when I discovered my wife is night-blind.) Every other day there is no power for 24 hours. I can tell you it is no fun shivering your way with a flashlight to the jeep that takes you into the jungle at 5.45 am when the fog is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Towards the end of our stay it began raining one night and wouldn’t let up well into the next afternoon, washing away what little hopes we had left of seeing a tiger. But I am happy to report that practically every other person who came to Bandhavgarh in that period saw the animal I’d wanted to see. I didn’t get to see B2, the dominant male tiger who has been seen spraying his urine on trees well outside the park in a bid to blatantly extend his territory.

B2 dominates the local consciousness. Everybody has a favourite B2 story to tell. Even my four-year-old daughter made up a ditty, "Bechara B2", her take on an imaginary tussle between B2 and sibling B1 for territory. Someone even saw B2 taking a crap on the road. I have been gloatingly told it was a glorious sight. The day we left, we heard he’d killed a cow outside the park. Once he killed, according to local lore, five cattle in a day. One after another. On the run. Just for fun.

You might justifiably wonder why a tiger is called B2, of all names. Depending on which guide is telling you the story, B stands for Baccha or Brother. I didn’t get to see his siblings B1 or B3 either. Nor his cousins. I saw his mother Sita, though. In a bbc documentary.