Finding tiger

Books on wildlife (and nature) generally fall into neat categories—there are books by conservationists, by naturalists, books on ‘wild’ adventure, and an occasional novel that talks evocatively of the natural world. Tigers in Red Weather (Little Brown; Rs 1,100) by Ruth Padel straddles all these categories. Padels account of her travel through Asia in search of the tiger is interspersed with dollops of literature, personal detail, science and lyrical descriptions of the forests she treks through and the other animals she encounters. The book is structured in geographic sections that follow the route of her journey—moving from tracking the Bengal tiger in the Indian subcontinent to the Amur and the South China variety that are found in the jungles of Russia, Korea and China, and finally to the Malayan, Indo-Chinese and Sumatran tigers. It’s a wide ranging and highly adventurous journey—on which Padel sees a single tiger (in Madhya Pradesh). The closest she comes on other occasions is pugmarks and droppings—but Padel more than makes up for it with her sharp eye for every detail of the areas she visits, and her research on tiger conservation. Woven seamlessly into this narrative is another story—that of a broken relationship. This is an intensely personal, informative, engaging (and intriguing) book.