"Where would you like to go?" Salvador Dali in camouflage pants & a faded white vest asks. "Anywhere you would go!" I answer with hollow valour. His crazy crazy eyes see clean through me. Yet he turns, hacks his machete at an errant creeper in his way and on we go deeper, deeper into the steaming jungle tracing the pug marks of a striped tawny king.
-
The job of a Special Tiger Protection Force (STPF) guard at the Pakke Tiger Reserve, where the Eastern Himalayas begin in misty mysteries, is unavoidably "different". Being charged by a lovelorn elephant or chancing upon a militant jungle camp are all par for the course. Even by those standards, as per his STPF colleagues, Sanjay Disso is "a little different".
-
Different. In the way he pats a stately vellore tree, a familiarity one would reserve for a beloved grand-uncle. His guffaw of remembered delight as he talks of elephants undaintily tumbling down waterfalls rings through the forest. The cat grin that he wears as he shares stories of 'his' animals comes alive, almost glows in the depths of a darkening forest as we duck and weave, lift and heave.
-
Different. The Dali resemblance is more than coincidental. When not patrolling, Sanjay paints. Not molten clocks, but persistently happy animals – a cheerful great hornbill here, a positively ecstatic flying squirrel there – on the walls of the forest rest-houses that dot Pakke. Boots on the ground protection apart, he makes exquisite fibreglass casts of hornbill beaks which substitute for the real thing in the traditional rituals of native Nyishi tribals.
-
Different. But both this thick glasses wearing nature documentary nerd and this man for whom the forest is "the neighbourhood" giggle nervously when deep in & a little lost, the forest rips open not only my week-old trekking shoes but his too. We stand in sombre solidarity over a shard of motorcycle fender plastic, proof of a recent forest guard fatality in an ill fated crossing of paths with an elephant.
-
At the end of my stay, we visit his little shack at the edges of Pakke, the exposed brick walls and the naked light bulb of which make us miss the green radiance of the forest all the more. He tells me with kindergarten glee of the camera trap photography contest that he obviously won. The only time his laughing eyes betray a glint of steel is when he explains to me poacher tactics.
-
Sanjay Disso. Artist. Warrior. Happy child of the forests. Grim guardian of the beasts.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment