Whirling through the World

Sahas and I returned from Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve on a train from Jabalpur. As soon as we sat down on our birth in the second class AC coach we realized it would be a difficult journey. A family with two little children sat across from us, discussing how they had only two tickets for half of the distance to Mumbai. This had also happened on our first train trip to Nagpur and had led to cramped conditions in the compartment, with people sleeping on every surface available on the overnight journey.

As it happened, this family turned out to be even worse traveling companions. Their 5-year old daughter complained constantly and demanded to be fed dinner from the top birth of the train. At dinner time, while the rest of us waited, hungry, for venders to pass our compartment with meals, her mother pulled out a fully packed dinner of rice, rotis, vegetables and daal, and proceeded to dish out food to her family in our cramped quarters. Food passed between mouths and across births, and soon rice and rotis rained from the high tiers and coated the floor.

In the morning, Sahas woke me to a jarring discovery: our train had been stopped for 2 hours on the tracks and showed no signs of continuing any time soon. We weighed our options and jumped off the train onto the platform. Thirty minutes later a local Mumbai train picked us up and we headed towards the suburbs of the city. Two rickshaws and an hour later, we walked into Sahas’ home, happy to be home and off the road.

Sightseeing along the Queen's Necklace in Mumbai at sunset.

My whirlwind tour of the tiger reserves in central India has finished, leaving me with conversations of conflicts to deconstruct into a dissertation topic. As I slowly digest the relationships between tigers, prey and villagers, I’ve returned to the US to obtain a new visa and attend an orientation for the Critical Language Scholarship Hindi program. I’ll return to India on Friday via New Delhi and then settle in Jaipur, where I’ll study Hindi through the American Institute for Indian Studies until the end of August. My fieldwork has ended for the moment, although I do hope to visit Ranthambore and possibly Sariska Tiger Reserves while I’m in Rajasthan, since these protected areas are infamous for high human densities within and around the parks. From central India to Mumbai, London, New York, New Haven, Washington DC and now Jaipur – what a wild week this has been!