Spirit of the Ghats

We were nine people in a gypsy meant for six. I was at the left with the safety handle pressing into my greater trochanter (a part of the femur bone that you feel when you feel the side of upper thigh). My paranoid paternal aunt was beside me, clearly troubled by the fact that we were about to enter a wild space in an open, “unsafe” manner.

We were at Chikhaldara and we were roaming inside the Melghat Tiger Reserve.

Chikhaldara is a hill station in the Amravati district, at the fringes of Maharashtra at its border with Madhya Pradesh. It gets its name from an event in the Mahabharata (which I would like to read up about).

So when you’re living in Chikhaldara and you drive 25 kilometers down a winding mountain road, you reach the Melghat Tiger Reserve lying in the Satpura mountain ranges.

It was December and the breeze was cool. We covered a lot of the forest area to get a feel of what Melghat was all about. Although we were not lucky to encounter a tiger, we enjoyed the greenery, the birdsong and the antelopes. A distinct experience while in the forest was the bison (gaur) sighting. When we spotted them (four of them), they were busy feeding on grass. They noticed us and one of them kept looking at us for a while before resuming their business. I specifically remember their limbs which looked like they had white socks on them.

It was nearing 6 p.m. and it had started to get dark. We headed outside. We had a winding mountain road (ghat) to traverse to get to our hotel. Travelling the ghat in the darkness with only the car headlights for illumination can get scary. But the sky above was full of stars which i never get to experience being in the city. Just looking up and feeling the breeze and watching the beautiful night sky is one of the important experiences that i cherish. I think we should give importance to these experiences. It is important to travel, to communicate with nature, to feel the sky, the earth, the grass and the ocean; to know that the trees around you are alive, to know that there are so many living things that share the earth with you and you must respect all of this.

So, while I was busy enjoying the starry sky, I was disturbed by some commotion in the car. The driver had noticed a stationary car on the path ahead of us and was forced to come to a halt. It was a red car. The person driving the red car, with hand gestures, asked our driver to put off the headlights. All of us were filled with curiosity, anxiety and a bit of fear which probably originated in my paranoid aunt and made its way into some of us.We all waited with our pulses rising for the suspense to end.

And then, there was that indescribable moment in which we saw the spirit; the hind limbs and tail of the leopard as it crossed the red car and disappeared into the valley beside us.

That fleeting moment in which all that my eyes appreciated was the black spots on yellow fur that just vanished in a matter of seconds, is something that will be etched in my memory forever. While that was all that my eyes appreciated, my mind was stimulated into wonder. This was it – the nature of the leopard – elusive, private and nocturnal. There for a moment and gone in another.

An unexpected encounter is always a memorable one. We drove back into Chikhaldara thinking about what we had just experienced. Christmas lights adorned the churches as it was Christmas eve. We told our hotel manager about our little adventure and he told us stories about having seen a leopard roaming the streets of the hill station at night.

I was left beautifully haunted by nature.