Tiger Mom

Wild boar crash through a grass path beside our tent; Indian cattle nose so close, I see an indentation in the canvas. It is the week before Christmas, and my nine-year-old son, Sascha, and I are glamping at the Shergarh wildlife camp, located on the edge of the Kanha Tiger Reserve in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. We are living in proximity to nature, to animals: jackals and antelope, peacocks and kingfishers, rock pythons, monitor lizards, leopards, and, of course, tigers, roughly 100 of which live in the protected environs of the reserve. We have electricity, a room heater, a bathroom with a shower, and water heated by a wood fire lit several times a day by the staff. My friends Katie and Jehan Bhujwala have operated Shergarh since 2004, and they mainly cater to wealthy Indians. Many of the others in our party work in finance and speak with posh accents. My trip is being funded by money from a Fulbright grant; my son and I would otherwise be pressed to find ourselves swaddled in such luxury.

We extract ourselves from our primordial warmth to embark on one of the safaris organized by Katie and Jehan. In the morning chill, Sascha wears two thermal shirts, a sweater, hats, gloves, a winter puffer. I have on two pairs of pants and two wool pullovers, plus the requisite combination of hat-gloves-muffler-windbreaker. After tea and biscuits in our tent, we set off. Darkness has not yet lifted when we climb aboard the jeep, moving blankets and hot-water bottles from seats to laps.

As we enter the forest, I imagine for a moment that I am on a hunting estate from a century ago, when Indian maharajas stewarded the vast tracts of land surrounding their palaces for the stalking of cats. One estate lay in nearby Surguja, a princely kingdom that is today connected to Kanha by a tiger corridor—a strip of land that allows the cats to safely travel from one fragile habitat to another. At the time of Indian independence in 1947, however, the protection of the country’s tigers was not of primary concern. The last maharaja of Surguja, Ramanuj Saran Singh Deo, killed 1,710 tigers in his territories, thought to be an individual record. Tigers were plentiful, prized for their pelts, though they weren’t the only animals in danger. Leopards, hyenas, and boar were also hunted, their heads destined for the taxidermist’s studio.

Romantic fantasies aside, I do not wish for a return to the era of wild-game sport; to the contrary, I wish there were more tigers in India today. We are here to see and only to see. That morning, we spot three wild jackals, a crested serpent eagle, a jungle owlet, and several wild boar with manes stretching along the length of their spines like punk rockers’ mohawks. The tiger, however, does not grace us with a sighting.

The tiger is a phrase one hears often at Kanha. It symbolizes many things and is heard in many contexts, but foremost it is shorthand for two competing values. It stands in for the project of wrenching India from its climate crisis, one that has implications for the entire planet. Safari tourism can contribute to greater awareness of climate change while bringing in the funds and expertise needed to advance stewardship of the natural environment and the protection of Indigenous knowledge. Resorts such as Shergarh indirectly help save the tiger. But the tiger also refers to the problem of becoming spellbound by the rush and adrenaline of seeing a big cat in the wild. People come again and again to places like Kanha, spending good money to procure just one more view. This desire, this obsession, is called “tiger centrism.”

Sascha and I have come to Kanha for an additional reason. The tiger is part of it, of course. But I am hoping that here, in the forest, both of us can find something more, a new way of experiencing the world.

A month before our arrival, an incident occurred in Sascha’s fourth-grade classroom at his Quaker school in central Pennsylvania. One day, his teacher gave the students a writing prompt: to compose … something. My son stared at the paper before him and told the teacher, “No way am I doing that.” Sascha has ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and what he meant to say was, The blank page is terrifying. I have no idea where to start. A special-education coordinator had already suggested that Sascha use graphic organizers to help him structure his stories and thus gain mastery over the gaping whiteness of the page. But his teacher had made it clear that she didn’t allow such individual accommodations in her classroom.

At the school, a bright, rainbow-colored peace sign adorned a vaulted meeting hall. The peace sign was emblazoned with the acronym SPICES—a mnemonic for the core Quaker values of simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. The teacher’s response to my son’s struggles perhaps illustrated the problem of two values scraping against each other: simplicity means that the same standards apply to everyone, and yet, community presumably requires the inclusion of those with differences. During one school meeting, parents and teachers dissected that problematic E in SPICES. Shouldn’t E stand for equity—meaning that all students be treated according to their needs and abilities? And if so, how does the difference between equity and equality affect the other core values? At one point, someone even crossed out the word equality and replaced it with equity, but the ontological contradiction remained.

After Sascha refused to do his assignment, his teacher sent him to the corner—the “peace place”—to think about what he’d done. Was this punishment? I asked in an email to the school. It became clear that there was no place in this Shangri-la of compassion, stewardship, and empathy for a child who could unravel the secrets of a five-by-five Rubik’s cube but couldn’t adequately communicate his struggles with the blank page.

It took Ernö Rubik a month to develop the algorithms to solve his own cube, my cousin with ADHD wrote to me. ADHD brains think interestingly.

We had been to Kanha once before, in February 2020—it was a place of happiness and serenity for us both. This was the main reason for our return: I wanted to see how Sascha’s ADHD brain might adapt and adjust to time spent in the forest, unplugged and attuned to nature, where the blank page was there to be filled in an unhurried, more unorthodox fashion.

Over tea and stollen, I confess to Katie my disappointment that the tiger eluded us that morning.

Perhaps she means to appease me, perhaps to instruct me, when she responds thoughtfully, “People don’t come to appreciate the forest. Of course it’s wonderful to see a tiger in the wild. But why the tiger? Why not the jackal or the hawk? Is it the chase? Is it the hype? When people see one, it’s not enough. They need to see more. Why is that?”

Why indeed? I pose the question to Nazneen, an inveterate tiger stalker who is here at the camp with us. She has been to tiger preserves more than a dozen times; at Kanha, she often pays for two safaris a day. She pauses to consider my question. “I’m awed by the tiger’s majestic strength,” she says slowly. “It’s the adrenaline rush when I see one walking up to me, the thrill of following the alarm calls, of the chase. The first real sighting, my hands were shaking holding the camera.” Just this week, she says, a tigress named DJ marched right up to her jeep and made eye contact, and then one of DJ’s cubs emerged from the brush and did the same. DJ is easily identified by the pattern of her stripes and by her brood. “It’s an incredible feeling,” Nazneen says. “I have a special connection with DJ.”

I understand. I, too, feel a special connection with DJ. Up to now, I have seen her just once, with three cubs. This took place during our previous visit here. We were sharing a jeep with Katie, Jehan, their two children, and Katie’s parents, who were visiting from the United Kingdom. Jehan idled the jeep near a watering hole in the dense, humid forest. Then the tigers emerged, first one cub, followed by a second and a third, somersaulting one over the other as they barreled into the water. And then came DJ, with her slow muscular gait, the swish of her hips, her gigantic paws, her thick maw emitting a circle of condensation. A sheath of vigor and spirit seemed to surround the mystical being. DJ skulked, got low to the ground, pounced into the water, and tumbled like a kitten alongside her offspring.

I, too, felt as if DJ had looked right at me, through me, as our jeep proceeded to trail her family along the dirt path. For 20 minutes, we followed the tigers, who seemed oblivious to the exhaust of the jeep and the hot, greedy breath of the spectators—20 minutes when time stopped and I simply was, present, there, complete.

Katie and Jehan organize these safaris not so much to satisfy guests who are spellbound by the tiger but to upset a whole constellation of attitudes about animals and nature. The Indian tiger population, which once numbered 100,000, was devastated during the hunting years of the British Raj, the almost-century running from 1858 to 1947. Of the eight species of tiger, two went extinct during this era, and the Bengal tiger—which once roamed the subcontinent from its southern tip to what are now Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—nearly did, too.

In India during the Raj, tigers were cast as maneaters, the embodiment of evil, and to spear one and flaunt its pelt as proof of its vanquishing became the ultimate symbol of manliness and stealth. The inveterate Raj-era hunter and conservationist Jim Corbett wrote many books, the most famous of which was called Man-Eaters of Kumaon. And the Orientalist H. Rider Haggard, whose adventure novels included such works as the 1885 bestseller King Solomon’s Mines, once wrote of a tiger that

lurked around the village in the dark of night, and when light came and people crept out of their huts, it rushed in, seizing now one and now another, and bounding away with its prey in its mouth. No fence could keep it out, nor would it tread on any pitfall, while so swift were its movements that none could hit it with a spear.

In 1973, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government enacted Project Tiger to protect the Bengal tiger and its habitats by appropriating royal hunting grounds and establishing reserves. As a consequence, the tiger’s reputation (and its numbers) improved—rising from roughly 1,800 in 1972 to 4,000 today—but the dream of connecting a tiger corridor across India remains unrealized.

There is a particular calm that comes with settling into the routines of camp life. Sascha rides a brakeless bike along the pathways and becomes a sidekick to a group of teenagers from Mumbai. One time, imagining the algae on the surface of the camp’s lagoon to be solid, he drives the bike straight into the water. Just as quickly, he fishes it out and pops up onshore, where he is greeted by the teens’ uproarious laughter. I spend long afternoons reading in the tent, and in the evenings, I sip mulled wine and chat with Katie, Jehan, and Catherene, a nature guide who has moved to Shergarh from her family home in Gujarat for the fall–spring tourism window. Joining us are an Indian hedge fund manager, a soda magnate, a safari tour operator, and an elderly British couple on safari for the first time.

Through it all, I keep thinking about something else. Why, I wonder, do I feel such desperation for just one more glimpse of a tiger? When I have a premonition that the tiger will continue to slight me, the feeling is both haunting and unsettling.

Katie had said that it’s better to spend time walking in the forest than focusing so singularly on the tiger, and I do agree with her. In part to better manage my expectations, I arrange for us to take a walk with Catherene and Karan, our certified guide from the forest service. Under overcast skies, we trek into the buffer zone, a ring circling the protected forest core that contains both villages and hiking trails, with Catherene walking ahead. “Oh no. Oh nooo,” I hear her say from several paces beyond a crook in the path. She is telling Sascha and Karan that she has come upon a dead monkey. “It’s very clean. It seems like he just fell. Poor thing.”

The monkeys here, known as midlands langur, have the faces of old men: small, rectangular, and ink black, appearing to be disproportionately petite against the fuzzy gray globes of their heads. We’ve learned the hard way not to look Indian monkeys in the eye. Once, while I was conducting field research at a temple farther south, Sascha wandered toward a clutch of langur and got into a staring contest with one. He never told me exactly what happened next. I only know that the encounter ended as he tore through the temple plaza crying and screeching, the villagers throwing sticks to scare the monkeys off.

Now, I round the bend and see the fallen monkey lying on his side, curled into himself like a boy taking a peaceful rest. Catherene points up. He must have been asleep on a very high bough and crashed from his perch.

“Well, that will be good food for someone,” Catherene says, nodding toward the corpse. I feel grief at the monkey’s death, but Catherene has already moved through the five stages and beyond. “Someone’s going to survive. Probably jackals. Lots of things to eat it.” She lists all the creatures that will feast on this rot: wild boar, wild dogs, porcupines, mice, maggots, ants. “Once it’s opened, for the whole body to get completely melted into the soil, the decomposition will happen really fast, a couple of days—weeks, maybe. Two jackals can finish that.”

When I hear the call of another monkey, I imagine it is its own ululation of mourning—three barks, a scraping sound. But I am wrong.

“Warning call,” says Catherene. She motions for us to keep still.

I wonder if the langur is screeching about us, letting the other forest monkeys know that human interlopers are trespassing. But I am wrong again. The monkeys here are standoffish, unlike in populated areas where they scavenge for food. Even the big cats, the raptors, the canines with sharp pointy ears—none of them is much bothered by humans here, at least most of the time.

“Leopard,” Catherene says.

A passage from Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon, in which he describes the call of the leopard, comes to mind:

Every bird and animal within hearing [knew that the animals] were warning the jungle folk of the presence of a leopard.

From the manner in which [they] were calling it was evident that the leopard was in full view of them. A little more patience and they would tell us if he was alive. They had been calling for about five minutes when suddenly, and all together, they called once and again, and then settled down to their regular call.

Perhaps we will espy the leopard. In our silence, we begin to hear other noises, including a boom from an overamped AV system coming from a distant village wedding. When you stop to listen for silence, what you discover instead is a peeling back of layers of sound. Why does the air seem to hum? Are airplanes, hidden by the clouds, rattling against the firmament? Is it their reverberation, an echo, that we hear? Or are we really only sensing the vibrations inside our own bodies, in our ears? Why does the air seem to hum?

The bark again, three times.

“I believe there is a leopard watching us,” Catherene says.

Karan stands as if freeze-framed, mid-step. Even Sascha stays still, though nearby is “his” tree (a ficus that he climbed during our last visit here), and I can tell he is itching to see it again. Catherene calls it the Sascha tree—not just because of his fondness for it but because Sascha sounds like saja, the name of another local tree, one that’s believed to be sacred. The Sascha ficus has long boughs that extend parallel to the ground like the wings of an eagle, like an invitation to the adventure seeker to climb onboard.

In time, the langur call subsides, and Sascha climbs his tree. Karan, Catherene, and I squat near a boulder to see a crevice where a family of wild dogs has made its nest. There are scratch marks and dog scat and a line of fresh urine, but no dogs or pups. Karan points out a female signature spider camouflaged against the lichen-blue of a saja tree, which, he explains, can be recognized by its crocodilian bark.

It takes my eyes a while to finally distinguish spider from bark. At its full extension, the spider is about the size of a small hand, and a big black X and a white cross decorate its orblike body. Catherene uncovers more mysteries of the forest: flesh-eating plants, such as Drosera indica, or the Indian sundew; “shy plants,” or “touch-me-nots,” as she calls the Mimosa pudica. Wild orchids grow on high branches of another saja tree. Orchids take nothing from the forest, she says. “They eat the air.” Clinging to another leaf is a boxer mantis nymph, with large yellow flakes of exoskeleton atop each foreleg. The tiny nymph lifts one foreleg and then the other, such that it seems to be boxing with big, clumsy mitts. A line of red ants climbs the saja tree and leaves behind a trail of bright yellow formic acid—prized for its sharp, sour flavor by the forest-dwelling Gond people, who turn it into a chutney. “Here, taste,” Catherene offers, though I decline.

I turn my gaze to a rock, on which I see a smattering of mica chips, iridescent and pearl-like. Many of these chips are as big as a fist. It’s as if a meteor has exploded, the array so thick, the wafers piled high. They pick up flashes of light even from the overcast sky. I stare into the mound, dazzled, invigorated. Something is happening in the forest. My perception is at once narrowing and widening. I am getting outside myself and becoming more aware of the smallest details.

Farther along the path, we see leopard scat, twisted at the ends like toffee wrappers, with animal hairs poking through. The droppings sit atop the sandy soil, and on either side are scratch marks and intaglios of leopard paws. The scene is completed by a circle of moist soil. Catherene leans into it and waves a hand to bring the scent closer: leopard urine, pungent and bitter. “This is fresh, while Sascha was climbing the tree,” she says. “That’s why the langur were calling. We were definitely seen by the leopard. One hundred percent leopard.”

The urine smell follows us. At an opening in the path, we come upon a wide stream with big boulders; the stream separates the buffer ring from the core of the tiger preserve. There is a sudden crash—a blistering sound, loud, startling, awakening—and a huge sambar stag emerges from the brush a hundred yards downstream. Its antlers are as wide as its body is long. It hurtles through the open space and into the water. The noise is raucous, the water frenetic and tossing spume. The beast finally alights on the far bank, where predators such as the tiger and leopard are known to lie.

In the forest, the cycle of life is brutal. Recently at Kanha, Catherene tells us, two male barasingha stags locked antlers in battle. The deer’s name comes from the male’s arabesque-like antlers, which have 12 (bārah in Hindi) prongs (singa). In the contest, one of the barasingha speared the other with the sharp tip of an antler. The loser would bleed to death and become so much carrion for jackals, wild dogs, tigers, leopards, hawks, and eagles. The winner, though, couldn’t disentangle his antlers from his foe’s. “They both died,” Catherene says. An apt metaphor for our human catastrophe—in our thirst to survive, we are killing our own species. And then, Catherene adds, “the jackals ate them.” At the beginning of the last century, the barasingha species was, like the tiger, verging on extinction, but because of  repopulation efforts in the Kanha preserve, its numbers soared from just 66 to 2,000.

We encounter many more signs of a secret world pulsing with life: the scratches of otter claws at the shallow edge of the stream, bear scat, monkey calls (two barks, indicating a firsthand tiger sighting), spotted deer warning calls (a secondhand call, perhaps mimicking the monkey), fresh pugmarks as large as a human face—meaning a tiger has slinked nearby, pug meaning “foot” in Hindi. After Catherene tells us that elephants were also a vital part of this ecosystem, clearing paths with their massive footfalls, Sascha wonders aloud whether we’ll see any. No, she says: they are mostly in captivity in this part of Kanha. She tells us, as we meander farther, that elephants remember their dead—their memory is so long, it is ancestral. Walking along the forest path, elephants will stop at the spot where a kinsman has died and stand for several minutes in vigil. They will do this for years, decades, even generations. How is this communicated? I want to know. But a part of me doesn’t want to know because it’s one of the ineffable mysteries of the forest.

Transhumance describes the migration patterns of shepherds and sheep, but the term also challenges the notion that we live in an age—the Anthropocene—during which humans rule the planet. As the theory goes, by paying attention to how animals attune themselves to nature, we might better be able to navigate the environmental peril of our moment.

I recently had occasion to look up the concept of transhumance. I teach a graduate course at Penn State on the essay, and one of my students wrote about how her ADHD drugs had medicated her humanness, her animal nature. She likened herself to a bird trapped on the wrong side of the glass in her family’s sunroom. Her animal instincts suppressed, she now sat at a desk doing schoolwork for 10 hours straight. She wrote in her essay that this was not her natural state of being. What, then, does her medication-induced adaptation to societal norms say about our culture’s intolerance for the human animal?

Around that time, I found in my basement a box of clothing that an Indian tailor had sewn for me many decades before, when I was an exchange student on an earlier Fulbright grant. There in the box were several size-zero outfits, talismans from a time when I was anorexic and struggling in mind and body. I had wondered before whether my student also suffered from anorexia—I saw so much of my earlier self in her—and I now began to think of this illness in the context of transhumance.

There are many lenses on anorexia—control issues, mother issues, female rage—but only rarely does one talk about the possibility that those with the disease harm themselves because they feel that they are the sane ones in an insane world. Why should we eat when the planet endures a slow, gory death of our making? Perhaps anorexia is a form of grieving, too. We have no tolerance for the human animal, I wanted to tell my student. We must consider new ways of being.

One day at camp, Katie passes me a book called The Cult of the Tiger, by the anthropologist Valmik Thapar. He writes that the Baiga tribal community, native to these parts, associates the tiger with Durga—the all-powerful Hindu goddess, the fierce mother who protects and gives strength, but also, contradictorily, destroys. In imagery found all over India, the eight-armed deity is depicted riding sidesaddle on a tiger. Like Durga, the tiger in local mythology is sometimes a protectress and sometimes a demon who demands obeisance and will eat your children. This vexing duality likely reflects an ancient joining of folk customs and Vedanta, the theological underpinning of Hinduism. Vedantic traditions reached these remote communities late, from outside, and were overlaid on animistic beliefs, according to which all beings and things are imbued with qualities of the living. Consistent with depictions of Durga from early medieval times and before, the tiger was, at first, a comforting mother figure and an emblem of fertility. Perhaps this animism also explains the association of the holy saja tree with the tiger. During the dry season, the tree stores water, causing its bark to appear blue. At such times, it is believed to hold the spirit of the tiger, just as the tree also holds the spirits of the ancestors.

What is it about the tiger that inspires associations with the divine? What mystical reverberation does she make as she prowls the forest floor? Perhaps this indescribable something explains that drugged stupor in her acolytes, why she leaves us spellbound, enchanted by the thrill, why we become captivated prisoner-addicts who are stuck, craving, needing. Perhaps there is something more to this than chase and hype.

One uncomfortable topic at Kanha is poaching. Hired by men from outside, locals trap, drug, kill, and dismember tigers before smuggling the remains into China. There, every part of the animal is used in traditional medicine to cure numerous ailments and, above all, to boost male fertility. In 2019, a beloved tiger king, Chhota Munna, disappeared from this very tract of forest, presumably poached for the market. As painful as it is to contemplate, it’s somehow unsurprising that the tiger’s mystique gets transmuted in this way—into collective fantasies of fecundity and potency.

A few years before, I’d met Katie and Jehan in an area of western India where they host homestays in a family manse built by Jehan’s ancestors. Jehan being Sascha’s middle name, we all became fast friends. At Kanha, Katie and Jehan take care of guests who are mostly friends of theirs or friends of friends from the city they still call Bombay—not Mumbai (which became the new name in 1995)—because in so many ways, they are outsiders in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s technocratic, pro-industry, authoritarian religious state. As members of the Parsi religious community, Jehan’s family and many of his Bombay cohort live at the fringes of the new Hindu India. Under Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism, Sanskrit place names are replacing British ones, and Islamic names are also under threat. (It’s only a matter of time before the city of Ahmedabad becomes Amdavad.) At the tent camp, however, it’s as if we are living in another time. To invoke the name Bombay is like uttering a wish, the hope that the anachronism may turn back the clock on the ongoing threats to civil liberties, press freedoms, religious tolerance, and democracy.

To increase India’s Bengal tiger population from 4,000 to, say, 40,000 would mean countering a whole culture of massive, unbidden industrialization, the throes of which India has been in since independence. Today, enormous construction projects produce urban shopping malls that go quiet after just a few years. New megaliths arise near suburban ring roads where there are no sidewalks, just dirt paths and tent cities sheltering barefoot children and open fires, dirt-floored shanties and lean-tos. Meanwhile, the relentless construction of dams, new roads, luxury apartment complexes, and office towers has led to deforestation and the devastation of wildlife habitats. Staggering amounts of pollution necessitate school closures in the thermal-inversion valley of New Delhi for weeks on end during the vulnerable period of early winter, and the disruption of the monsoon cycle causes village-eradicating floods and landslides. All the while, temperatures in much of the subcontinent rise to unbearable levels during the unforgiving months of late spring and summer. In May 2024, the Indian capital broke its heat record with a temperature of 126° Fahrenheit.

As a consequence of all of this, most experts have set a modest target for the revived Bengal tiger population: 5,000. But the tiger activists of Kanha also believe that it is through a love of the tiger that members of the progress-minded industrial class might change their attitudes toward rampant development. Katie describes the conflict this way: “Pro-industrialization means anti–wildlife habitat preservation. How do you reconcile?”

In this sense, Kanha’s tiger activists are part of a larger movement in India to harness Indigenous knowledge about safeguarding the natural world and to thus counter climate change. One such advocate is Vipul Gupta, cofounder of Earth Focus Kanha, a nonprofit that empowers Kanha’s tribal communities through education and economic sustainability. With its focus on restoring the forest and forest communities, this group pushes back against both development and tiger centrism. “At age 10, I first came to Kanha when Project Tiger was launched,” Gupta tells me, “and my relationship with this landscape was born. All the resources, all the brilliant minds were focused on the tiger, and the tiger in 900 square kilometers. We displaced a lot of people, and we made these people adversaries, and we left them to fend for themselves. Why are we facing climate challenges now? We have overlooked tens or hundreds or thousands of years of local wisdom and knowledge. These communities were part of that ecosystem. Bringing the communities back to the center will certainly help.”

Kanha’s 360 square miles are home to 105 tigers, according to a 2022 government census. There are more females than males, and one of the females is infertile, apparently because of an abnormality in her hips: her tail points up, rather than swooping to the ground and then gently rising at the tip. A female tiger can birth several litters in her lifespan, but cubs have only a 50 percent chance of surviving in the wild. After deforestation, male tigers pose the greatest threat to baby tigers. The males can’t distinguish their progeny from those of a rival and have been known to destroy entire litters either in their quest for alpha status or to further their own gene pool. Tigers sit at the top of the food chain—they are kings of the jungle. Perhaps such infanticide promotes natural population maintenance and thus symbiosis within the ecosystem.

And when tigers spill into the buffer zone of the Kanha preserve, conflicts arise with people who regard them as fearsome, a menace to cattle and themselves. Driving through the region, I often see long rectangles of orange, magenta, red, fuchsia, and canary yellow saris laid out in the fields to dry after washing, their colors stark against the golden steppe landscape. The bright saris are perhaps a way to discourage tigers. Keep the cats away, and humans can better live in harmony with them. Early one morning not long ago, a woman in a brightly colored sari squatting in a field was perceived by a tiger to be an object of prey. Her bright red garment may have kept her safe before, but on that morning, it failed.

In the days before we flew to Kanha, I withdrew Sascha from the Quaker school and enrolled him at the neighborhood public elementary school. His new teacher would be instituting a genius hour, an idea borrowed from Google. The idea is that people should spend a significant percentage of their time doing something they feel passionate about, on a project of their own choosing. “What is something your child cannot stop thinking about?” wrote the teacher in the explanatory letter.

“I think you know,” Sascha said to me.

“Pokémon Go?”

“I can’t wait to evolve Evie and hatch eggs.”

I was reminded of a comment I’d read on a social media “inclusion” group: “Game rooms are neurodiversity gyms.”

Is it too reductive to say that in the forest, a nine-year-old boy can be himself? At Shergarh, Sascha keeps missing his dose of ADHD meds before breakfast, and then I start forgetting to give him the capsules at all. “It’s painful to see children undermedicated,” his psychiatric nurse had said when we were trying to settle on a dose. She wanted more; he wanted less.

Pokémon Go is a video game that involves going on walks while a virtual map simulates your surroundings on your smartphone. One tries to discover Pokémon—cute Japanese animé-style monsters—“in the wild.” Unlike tigers in the real world, the adorable beasts—literally “pocket monsters”—appear plentifully in the virtual simulation. Probably like many nine-year-old boys, Sascha loves to lock his consciousness inside the three-by-six-inch space of the smartphone screen. And yet, here at the tiger camp, he hasn’t asked for Pokémon Go at all. Perhaps I am seeking not so much the sight of a tiger but that of a nine-year-old boy being fully alive. This is the addictive feeling that I crave.

Over five safaris, we roam fruitlessly across the forest, and I find myself cursing my tiger centrism.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, we set off on our final safari. In just a few hours, a full moon will rise. Joining us are the camp’s most senior guide, Rajan, and a family from Mumbai: Girish, Vinitha, and their two teenage sons, one of whom is attending college in the United States. For the first time, Sascha chooses to sit with the other guests. He no longer yearns for the warmth that comes from huddling under my arm. Being detached from my child is a new feeling for me, an anticipatory one full of freedom and fresh ideas. It brings me a distant memory of what it was like to live inside my body before it gave forth this child. It is as if I’ve been alienated from myself this past decade, and in the meantime, I have constructed a new self. What will it be like, when Sascha detaches even further, to meet that old self again?

Can I tell you that I immediately recognize DJ by her stripes, by a keyhole pattern on her midsection? Can I say that she sees me, sees my new self and my old self and that in that moment, the two have cohered? Can I tell you that when I see her two cubs, young adult tigers already, I believe them to be two of the three I had previously seen, from her litter of 2019? But I am mistaken: these two are from a newer litter. The earlier cubs, I learn, have perished.

Slowly, more jeeps arrive. The tigers wrestle, tumble, spar, then one by one amble from the grass field to a small lagoon. One cub and then the next sidle into the water, take a dip. A cub sitting beneath a ficus branch enters the lagoon and submerges herself to the elbows, looking right at us. By now, 20 jeeps are all lined up. As before, DJ and the cubs come right to the road, cross between our jeep and another, then walk parallel to the road as we follow along. For the second time in four years, I keenly watch this tiger, and I feel that she sees me.

Later, I reimagine this moment, call forth the vision many times, when I am feeling unsettled, nervous, insomniac, bereaved. I put my brain and a mental hologram of my body onto that path and feel the air tingle. Everything shimmers and vibrates.