Dobbie - India: the tigers roar

Published by

An Imprint of Melrose Press
St Thomas Place, Ely
Cambridgeshire
CB7 4GG, UK
www.melrosebooks.co.uk

FIRST EDITION

Copyright Aline Dobbie 2004

The Author asserts her moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

Jacket Photography by kind permission of Chris Brunskill
Copyright Chris Brunskill 2004
Jacket Design by Ross Hilton
Interior Photography by kind permission of Harshad Patel
Copyright Harshad Patel 2004
All other photography Copyright Aline Dobbie 2004

ISBN 0 9548480 2 0
eISBN 9781908645562

All rights reserved. No Part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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This book is dedicated to the Tigers of India, together with all the other great cats of the Indian subcontinent such as the Asiatic Lion, the Leopard and the Snow Leopard.

The Tiger, the king of the jungle is both beautiful and powerful; he walks alone with stealth and grandeur. Since my infancy tigers have continued to fascinate me; I want to encourage an awareness of their magnificence and their vulnerability, and help ensure their continued existence in the wild.

All creatures have an equal right to live on this Earth

Mahatma Gandhi

India: The Elephants Blessing

India: The Peacocks Call

For more information please visit:

www.thepeacockscall.co.uk

My deep gratitude for my husband Grahams great support and encouragement; he has been a constant source of strength throughout my research and writing. I would also like to say a big thank you to Harshad Patel for the use of his wonderful black and white wildlife photography which I have been so generously allowed to use. Chris Brunskill too has with such enthusiasm and warmth allowed me the use of his beautiful colour photography of tigers for the cover from his own book Tiger Forest.

There are other friends like Shreela Flather, Viola Hallman, Hemant Patel, Mala Sen, Krishan Ralleigh, Premen Addy, Divyabhanusingh, Tony de Souza, and Tim Scollary who have all helped me with their encouragement and support. To them all I say thank you for your belief in me.

Finally to all who helped me within India be they Travel Personnel, Guides, Forest and Park Personnel, Naturalists, Military Personnel and my Drivers, plus naturally my Indian friends, both old and new Thank You.

Aline Dobbie

A s I stand in the six inch deep snow in our garden here at Rosewood, distributing pheasant food and bird seed, I look up into the vivid blue sky with the weak winter sunshine touching the hilltops and think of three months ago, when I was in Delhi on Diwali day.

After an interval of a couple of years, Graham and I had given ourselves a much longed for return to India. My first book had been published in Britain in the summer of 2002 and that autumn presented an excellent opportunity to go to India to research and enjoy some of the great wildlife parks as well as to visit an area of India to which I had previously been only fleetingly, Madhya Pradesh; the very heart of India.

The garden is covered in a blanket of snow and most of Scotland is having a challenging time weather wise but, here in my beloved Peeblesshire, conditions are not at all bad, in fact rather beautiful. The eight pheasants who think that they belong to us and thus arrive at least once daily to be fed are a source of pleasure. On a maidan in a jungle clearing in India one would inevitably see peacocks, here in the gentle Scottish Borders however, it is more likely to be pheasants. Raju accompanies me to feed them. He was a kitten whilst I wrote my first book, India: The Peacocks Call but now he is a mature, sleek black cat with wonderful green eyes like two peridots. He knows that the pheasants are forbidden to him and they all co-exist very happily, sometimes it has to be said with the occasional rabbit also on the scene. Graham is not at all happy about the rabbits!

India had been wonderful, as usual. Of course, it is the land of my birth and therefore there probably exists for me a sort of natural love of the place and a feeling of belonging but Graham also has a great affection for the country and we have a sort of ritual that we indulge ourselves in when we first arrive.

On this last occasion, we had chosen BA as the carrier and were not disappointed. It was the first long haul flight that we had encountered after the appalling incidents of 9/11 in 2001. We decided to choose the national carrier and were impressed by the thorough security checks and standard of service. The flight, though all ready to roll, was held up at the last minute (because of the careless behaviour of a passenger) until every single passenger and their baggage was reconciled with the passenger list. Frustrating and boring though this was, it impressed us and the pilot made up the time lost.

Sadly, Indira Gandhi airport, Delhis international airport, had improved very little in the intervening years since my last visit in 1998. Immigration took one hour for us mere mortals before we were out on the concourse looking for the welcoming faces of Naveen Kumar and the driver from Travel House. Driving through the suburbs of Delhi at three in the morning is always so interesting. Now it was the run up to Diwali so there were one or two extra sights to behold. The famous sweet makers around Bengali Market were working frenetically through the night to provide their customers with mounds of sweetmeats, like jalebis, burfi, laddoos, rusgullahs, gulab jamuns and so forth. As we passed through the centre of Bengali Market one could almost smell the sugar and fragrance of rose water as well as see the feverish activity under huge electric lights that made it possible for the mitthai wallahs to continue to work right through the night. Graham and I grinned at each other, and just wished the rest of the family could be with us. Having been fed sweetmeats since a toddler by my father who won jalebi eating contestants with his men in the army, I have a great love for them and Graham found no difficulty whatsoever in sharing this particular pleasure. The heaven of a crisp fried jalebi golden and curled which drips glorious golden juice when bitten into is a family pleasure with us. We resolved that later in the day we would return to buy some sweetmeats and experience the whole human chaos and confusion that is obligatory in any build up to a religious festival the world over.