Asian Walkabout

Nature has an eye for beauty. Humans have been so taken by her elements that we have immortalized them as symbols of our own experience. Serene is a sunset over the Caribbean (just ask any Corona commercial for verification). Adventure is a sheer cliff overlooking a gaping jungle canyon. Love is a long-stemmed red rose. Then, there are some things so rare, powerful, and exquisite that you get an adrenaline rush just thinking about them.

This is why we headed to Ranthambore National Park. It’s the only place in Rajasthan to see the tiger, an animal so immaculate and precious that people still believe its parts to have supernatural powers. Tigers are being poached to the verge of extinction, but in Ranthambore, you can still hop on a Jeep at dawn or dusk and see them in their natural environment.

We decide on a dawn Jeep safari. At 6 am, we duck into a 6-person topless Jeep on a morning cold enough to freeze a carp. Park staff assign each Jeep a gate through a lottery, as only a limited number of vehicles are allowed in any one area at any given time. There are six zones, and no telling where the tigers will be lurking. We’re assigned Zone 2 and cross our fingers that it will produce the tiger sighting we’re after.

As soon as we drive onto the premises of the park, we enter a raw, pulsing kind of wild. You know those settings they put tigers in at the zoo, with boulders and undergrowth and shallow pools? It’s like that, but with the intrepid romance of reality added on. Ancient Banyan trees dreadlock into undergrowth as dense and cluttered as a shag rug.

Sheer-sided mountains stretch skyward around the flat, amoeba-shaped lake in the middle. Higher up, boulders rest on dun-colored plains where spotted deer graze and vipers sun themselves. Wild birds cackle from the 1,000-year-old Ranthambore Fort, which gazes down from the park’s horizon.

After this brief introduction to the park, we arrive at our assigned gate, Number Two, swaddled like infants to keep out the cold. A blink of an eye later, we see him.

He’s barely perceptible as he crunches through dead undergrowth ten feet from our vehicle. Eleven feet from head to tail, he’s one of the park’s biggest cats. He walks right up to our Jeep and stares at us with a tribal face the size of a hubcap. His white eyes indicate curiosity, but the pupils remain cautiously contracted. Stripes as wide as a human arm ink his powder-orange coat, its softness concealing the chiseled body inside.

He is perfect in a raw, aching way. The aching is his aesthetic flawlessness; the raw is our own human fear. We instantly imprint him into our memory banks.

After a long glimpse, our driver floors it in reverse, getting out of his way in case he gets wild. The tiger pads in our direction with pancake-sized paws, sniffing a bramble here, spraying a tree there. Our nervous driver keeps reversing the Jeep in fitful jerks. Tourists in Jeeps and canters (topless trucks with 20 seats) cluster behind the big cat to get a better look. The feline swings into thick undergrowth a full five minutes later, leaving our mouths agape.

He is our only tiger of the morning, but we’re satisfied. Luck will find us again nine hours later, but we don’t know that yet. The driver takes us deeper into Ranthambore’s fantastically gnarled wilderness, past cliff-hugging fort ruins, dense forests, lime-green parakeets, and magpie-crows that eat bananas out of your hands. A multitude of wild things—jaguars, alligators, mongooses—lurk unseen on the park grounds.