Oil, Water and Stripes

It lies in puddles at the bottom of bowls and clings to the sides of serving spoons. It seeps into aloo and coats paranthas, lingering on your plate long after you’ve finished your food. Worst of all, it absorbs into your skin, staining your nails yellow and leaving a warm salty smell that lasts for hours. In Madhya Pradesh, oil is inescapable.

Sure, you can rinse your hand. But the water runs warm and is tinged brown with iron. The dry air makes your throat perpetually itch yet water only exacerbates the thirst. Here in Kanha, people share water like they do tiger stories, continuously passing, craving, filling. When you enter a house, it’s the first offering – “Panni?” (water?); when you leave the reserve, the first question – “Tiger?”. Unfortunately, be it water or tiger sightings, neither satisfies the burning desire for more. Sahas and I listen as tourists exchange stories while they gulp down glasses, exchanging, competing, outdoing. This morning we watched as the tourist jeeps returned from safari an hour early – a tiger had been sitting in a waterhole near the entrance gate; one look and they returned, full of stories about the tiger and the tiger only.

 

The tiger we saw on a tiger show in Kanha.

Climate change predictions foreshadow hotter, dryer summers with more scattered monsoon rains (Kumar et al. 2006). I wonder to myself, if the waterholes dry and the tigers diminish, how then will people quench their thirst?