Where the wild things are
One vertical and a second horizontal!’ said Brahm Dev, the doyen of Dehradun’s photographers, to his household help. He was giving her tips on photography as she went around taking pictures at home.
The 1940s saw Brahm Dev and his brother Raj arrive in Dehradun as refugees uprooted during the Burmese disturbances. They went on to build RK Studio on Ashley Hall (very close to where Ruskin Bond had in his early days written The Room on the Roof). All of us had met at a book release, and it was midnight when Ruskin and I drove the 34 km back home in my rinky-dink car. Little did we know that it would be a night to remember.
Rounding a curve above Kothal Gate, our headlights caught puffs of dust. Something was trying to get away—three panic-stricken cubs scurried in fright.
‘Keep moving, Ganesh!’ mumbled Ruskin. ‘The mother must be on the prowl, and this late, we are the intruders.’
Further up, driving above the Galogi Power Station, lay another solitary leopard warming its belly on the sun-baked parapet wall. I slowed down, and it twitched its rosette tail as if to say, ‘Go away! Let me be.’
‘Ah! That’s that!’ said Ruskin.
Or so we thought until I slowed down to take the sharp bend below Sher Garhi, another nocturnal feline, lunged across, and missed the car by a whisker before being swallowed by the night.
Nothing on either side was said.
‘If either you or I wrote about it,’ I said, ‘Who would believe us?’
Recently, a CCTV grab of a leopard on the prowl along Camel’s Back Road went viral, sending shivers down many spines. A feline struts, undisturbed by honking horns in the background. It knew no haste as it strolled past the lychgate of the cemetery before casually slipping through the railing into the darkness.
Strangely enough, the Landour Cemetery’s burial register records a single entry where the cause of death is ‘mauled by a leopard’. In the winter of 1949, on January 8, a 33-year-old Clarence Thomas Wyatt was ‘accidentally’ mauled by a panther in Maryville Estate below the old bridle path to Rajpur. He returned to the place where he had shot a leopard at sundown the previous evening. The wounded animal attacked Clarence, and despite his brother’s valiant attempts, it ended his life.
Sadly, no leopard bothered Ratti Lala, a moneylender from the 1970s, whose IOUs bore the scribbled signatures of his desperate victims.
‘A bagh has been sighted in Chunakhala!’ he grinned at Bhola Singh Rawat, the Chairman of the Municipal Board, who was a sure shot.
‘Let us go, you and me, my car and your rifle!’ Lalaji gushed. ‘Afterwards, we will drive along the Mall Road with the bagh spreadeagled on my car’s roof to scare the living daylights out of my debtors.’
The good news is that that night, the leopard went on a walkabout and never showed up.
Ganesh Saili
Author, photographer, illustrator
sailiganesh@gmail.com