Backpacking through Namibia some years ago, I found myself at a small camp out in the country. I don't remember any more how I got there, nor why, because nothing was notable about the place. Except this: for some inexplicable reason, they had two or three leopards in cages. The owners said they had just captured them in the wild, though they didn't say what they planned to do with the animals. Then they encouraged me to step right up to the cages and look at them.
I did so. I remember even today, as a sort of frisson of adrenaline runs through a trembling nerve somewhere in my body, the feeling I had at the time. These lithe, sleek cats were behind rigid bars they could never have broken through. I knew that. Even so, they had me suddenly sweating in fear. Not that they roared, nor even growled loudly. They didn't need to be loud. No, it was just the sheer menace in their eyes, the coiled tension in their bodies, the gently bared fangs, the almost graceful way they snarled at me.
The message I got was as unmistakable as if they had spelled it out: the only thing between you and swift death, buddy, is these bars. So get lost and leave us alone!
It was only long afterwards that it struck me: the leopards were every bit as frightened as I was, probably even more. After all, how terrifying must it be to be trapped and bundled into a small cage, to have strange humans peering in at you and grimacing? And there's something else too: it isn't wild animals who win when they have encounters with mankind. If we're talking about death, the evidence shows that leopards have far more to fear from us than we do from them.
These Namibia memories have been on my mind, of course, because of the spate of leopard attacks in Mumbai over the last couple of years. A photographer friend who went to Borivali to photograph some of the captured cats came back speaking of just what I felt in Namibia. Even though the leopards were in cages, they exuded a menace that had him shivering almost uncontrollably while he took his shots. Yet, like me, he was also conscious of how frightened the animals themselves were.
I say this without meaning at all to take away from the tragedy of these attacks. Leopards have killed several hapless citizens on the fringes of the Borivali National Park: taken them from their homes, silently attacked them as they took walks or went out to get water. This has got the residents of those areas angry and terrified, and understandably resentful of the cats, of a park that tries to "protect" them. All of which -- the attacks, the resentment -- should never have happened. Yet how sad that it takes grisly deaths like these to alert us to the growing crisis in what should be one of the country's finest sanctuaries, to the increasingly contentious line that runs between Indian animal and Indian man.
And yet, what's the answer? Now I'm no expert on wildlife, nor do I live in a place where my life itself is under constant threat from, of all things, leopards. I'm just a journeyman writer, just another citizen of this city with its infinity of problems. I'm moved by the sadness of these killings, yet admiring of the sleek power the killers have in abundance. I'm unwilling to accept that there should be any more of this unnecessary slaughter, yet unable to see how there will ever be an end to further confrontations. Because you could make a case that human history itself has seen men steadily moving into spaces that were originally