Sitting in the middle of Camp Hornbill under the wooden pagoda working on a promotional video for the Camp’s Instagram page, I was snapped sharply out of focus when a troop of monkeys burst forth from the nearby bushes, running and scampering out of the building site where the stone cottages were being constructed, racing across the camp all around me. They were too fast and I was too slow with my phone to get any good shots of them. There he went, chasing them. That guy… again. I’ve asked for his name and then forgotten it so many times I feel I cannot ask for it anymore but I have forgotten it and don’t know what to call him.
He led me down the path past the thickets and pointed upwards into the tree. There it was. One of them. Peering down at us. It’s pink mischievous face, it’s mouth open baring its teeth, screeching, and then leaping away across the branches so that leaves came fluttering down in handfuls.
Camp Hornbill is a group of mud cottages, a home-stay run on Eco-tourism practices, somewhere near Pali Village in Jim Corbett National Park. The nearest town is a place called Ramnagar which I managed to get to after two monstrous bus journeys and an auto-rickshaw ride from Rishikesh. Camp Hornbill focuses on hiring only locals – in order to keep young people from deserting Pali Village in search of employment.
Me and this guy – whose name I finally asked for one more time (it is Vijendra) continued to follow the monkeys until we saw the last of them disappearing off into the jungle.
Monkeys are the least of Jim Corbett’s fascinating creatures. Somewhere out there are tigers and elephants. Over 200 tigers though this number can climb to over 300 during certain months of the year when they migrate down from the mountains of Nepal. I’ve been reading about the history of man-eating Tigers in India. Camp Hornbill has some fascinating books on the subject. They do not go for humans naturally, but are forced to when their teeth get damaged by bullet wounds or by some other means. No longer able to use their teeth to take out their usual prey, they turn to human flesh instead.
I have been trying my best to make conversation with the employees of Camp Hornbill but they seem to have little to say to me even when I speak in Hindi. Vijendra especially will not speak to me though he appears friendly, and today, out of all the days I’ve been here, I spoke to him more than ever before thanks to the brief monkey invasion. But it only occurred to me much later on – and I cursed myself for being so stupid as I should have known – that Hindi is not this people’s language. As we are up in the North East, they must speak Gadwali – one of two native languages of Uttarakhand.
There is an eerie wilderness to this place. It feels so far out in the middle of nowhere – a jungle that is never quiet; always teeming with sounds of animals. Whether it be the rooster at morning or the thousand tweets of a hundred different breeds of bird, or the other strange calls coming from the jungle – who the hell knows what creatures they are… I have been kept up at night by cockroaches appearing next to my pillow, mere inches from my face, and then, with the fearful thought imprinted upon my mind that there may be more, I am kept awake further…
The food here is quite delicious, though sometimes I go hungry. It Is hard to believe I am surrounded by so many tigers…
…I so badly wanted to see a tiger. It was not to be. Instead, I simply saw tiger shit and tiger footprints. Better than nothing I suppose…
