Account of the Jungle King…

I am the King. They call me the man-eater. Once in a blue moon, when they’ve tortured me with their cameras and their cages, tried to pick on me, by wanting to ride on my back and have enjoyed the thought of making my remains, wall hanging I have stood steady on the reputation. I’ve respected my instincts. I’ve often ripped their guts apart and fed on their unholy flesh. I’ve slashed, their skins apart and have seen them bleed. I’ve scooped their eyeballs and beaten them till remnants. I’ve relished on their liver and galls and protected my cubs. But I’ve taken to this practice a few decades ago since they intruded into our kingdoms and started bounding our land, naming them, trenches, fences and what not, on the pretext of protecting me. Protection, I assumed would follow certain restrictions, from them but it was a revelation of how they minimized my food sources, my privacy, my moving around and my freedom, trying to make a lookalike arrangement. My natural being was carefully and gradually ruptured. Until then, there was harmony. We did not kill each other. We stuck to our own areas. Our children heard stories of each other’s kinds. Although they did proclaim killing me, a highly honorable thing and hence there were accidents but few.

On an impulse, then, they were “saving” me. Roaring about loud, they announced imprisonment of those with killings of me and my kind while I was imprisoned even without any. I suppressed the underlying anguish. Thought a little less of their harming nature. So just when I had started thinking otherwise, being easy on those weak instances of treachery, they relapsed and revealed their spiteful self.

Sneaking in through the gates, at Sivasagar in 2006, like thieves, two of them walked straight into my boundary, ignoring my warnings. Eternally prepared for breaking their spines, with my jaw, I made a move, having decided to put an end to another act of their cruel intention but on seeing him walk away, I let him go, lest his cubs go starving.

Though I let him go, we were both aware he could not escape my clutches if I meant slaughter. Out of an old grudge or none, he had succeeded in poisoning my singular pond. This, I realized only after I drank from it, having left with no other choice amid a hot summer midnight. My mind and body had grown old from trying to protect my clan. So, it took me very long to sense it. Long enough for the poison, to spread through my veins in my body.

Next, they translocated me to Manas, the national park, which is named ‘reserve’, and the Royal Manas National Park in Bhutan. My skin is precious they say. Deals worth millions were cracked in a nation that calls me their National Animal. Poisoning me is the only way they could have me killed as fighting me is not an option. I hear that he and his accomplices had hidden my skin in Betbari.

Hence relentless I go…intruding...evolving just like your species…only a little more endangered.