A night in the Jungle!

Fear rarely bids us goodbye. It either stays in the corner lanes of our mind or keeps encircling the edges of the cornea. The feel multiplies when you know you are passing through the lanes of a region belonging to predators. The twilight adds to the mysticism, while the numerous grey shades emerging by peeling-off the hues of orange manifolds your experience. 

After a disappointing evening safari, my jungle guide and driver dropped six of us at Nilay. (Before I proceed, I would like to tell you that a film students’ group from Hyderabad agreed to share their jeep and allowed me and my friend to join them for an evening safari). It is the only rest house with two log huts nearby that were built in the core region of Nagzira wildlife sanctuary. Graced by tall trees and a quaint lake, the place portrayed its dual personality as the sun settled behind the hillocks.

The greys slowly started covering itself with sheets of black and beckoned the nocturnal creatures to resume yet another night. At the lake, Indian Nightjars were finding pleasure in their flights of fun, while the Owlets kept a close eye on the passers-by.

Letting us imbibe the flow of silence, the guide then told us that it was not at Nilay where we would put up, but in a dormitory that was a few meters away from the rest house. So with little lights borrowed from the setting sun, we followed our guide’s footsteps.

In a jungle, if Sun is a harbinger of magical tales, the Moon heralds mysterious fables. One that can be read even in the dark. Our Braille system gets activated as we walk. The dots lead you nowhere but still you manage to arrive somewhere. There’s no way to halt your thoughts. Words join sentences. Sentences meet paragraphs. Paragraphs stumble upon stories.

As I tried to shut the doors of imagination, calls of spotted deer entered the doors and added three dots to my ever-flowing thoughts. “What kind of calls are those?” I asked. “It’s an alert call. They must have sensed danger nearby. This is a usual scenario in the jungle”, replied Prakash, my guide. His casual reply turned our casual walk into long strides. I joined my friend who was ahead of me and we both transformed ourselves into our guide’s shadow. At least that’s what we perceived. Even a hiss sound generated by the friction of our legs with crumpled leaves, resonated the loudest noise ever that travelled through the layers of our skin to produce goose bumps.

As we passed through the no man’s land, the minimal lights in our eyes suddenly found its partner at a mere distance. Gleams emitting from solar light panels, which were installed at different corners of the dormitory zone, discovered our eyes.

When we got closer to that place, it started filling with chaos of human noise. Those who had gone for a jungle safari were back, and sharing their experiences with each other. A few were busy staring at the dense region with an expectation of the sudden emergence of a loitering wild cat.

The guide took us to the canteen, which was just a few metres away from the dorm where we met his fellow mates. While chatting with them we got to know that spotting a striped flame is a matter of fortune. Because, just before the twilight, we had taken a halt at a spot where we could have chanced upon a striped flame. But then time passed by and with that we decided to move on. The fellow mates told us that if we had followed them to another water body, which was just ahead of the place where we stopped, we could have experienced the majesty of a lone Tigress. It is observed that unlike males, females don’t leave a place quickly. They move on at their own pace, and ease. But then it was too dark and the place had transformed itself into a battle zone.

As the silence grew, most of us decided to go back to our respective resting rooms and stepped-out only when the dinner got ready. Once we all had our full, I asked my guide if there is any landline phone to make a call back home. He said no but there are two places in the jungle where I can get full network. The first is a 2x2 sq. ft. area near the backyard of Nilay cottage, (which I discovered next morning) and the other one is half-a-minute distance away from the dormitory beneath a Mango tree.

It was a full moon night, but the night's lamp was hiding behind the dense region. And so, through a pitched dark route, my guide took me to the huge tree and then asked me to rest my back against its trunk. It was the funniest moment I ever experienced. I was leaning and trying to catch the network by holding my mobile in right hand and moving it in every direction of the jungle. What if the network’s stripes arrive along with the real stripes that covers the length & breadth of the jungle? And so I immediately decided to go back to the dorm - the safest place for me at that time on planet earth.

To wake up in the middle of the night is something that we all do when we change our sleeping position or location. I was fast asleep on the upper side of the bunker bed when suddenly around 3 in the night, (now that seems like a movie scene but I checked my watch) my sleep broke. My bed was next to the door which had a window on its top. It was open and I could easily see what’s happening outside, as my bed was at the window's height and the lights were kept on, outside. The night was sniffing the air of silence. And my mind, quickly started sniffing movements of wildlife. But over expectations always fall on the face and with that I had to close my eyes to wake up to experience a new day in the jungle.