Tarak Babu could have seen or heard little in the seconds before he died. His village of Jelepara in the far southwest of Bangladesh is desperately poor and has no electricity, and the young fisherman was walking back with food for his family at about 8:15pm.
It was June 20 — monsoon season. Tarak was walking along the high earth embankment that protects Jelepara from the Chunkuri River, and had just passed a small Hindu temple with its gaudy, painted wooden effigies of the tiger god Dakshin Ray. He would not have seen the real tiger that had just swum across the river from the great Sunderbans forest 400m away. It hauled itself out of the water and mauled him from behind. No one even heard Tarak cry out.
But that was just the start of the drama in Jelepara that night. According to Selina, a young woman who lives only a few hundred meters from the scene of the killing, the beast then dropped down off the embankment and silently entered Gita Rani’s family compound in the village. It tried to take a chicken, but Gita came out when she heard the commotion in the hen house and was promptly killed. The tiger then went into the house where it killed her father-in-law, Aghoire Mandal.
“Word spread fast that a man-eater was in the village,” Selina said. “Everyone was very frightened and angry. People came from all around and the tiger ran to another house half a kilometer away. There it killed some goats.”
Many villagers kept their doors shut and prayed that night, as others kept watch. When dawn came, the damage was counted: Three people, two goats and several chickens had been killed and the tiger was still in the village.
But rather than call the government forest department, 65km away, and hope that they would send a marksman to shoot the tiger, the people of Jelepara set about hunting it. It proved to be a brave but brutal exercise.
Now it was the animal’s turn to run. First dozens of men tried to corner it, blocking off its escape routes and chasing it away from the village. The tiger was tracked through long grass and rice fields. Finally it leapt on the roof of a house. Film shot on a mobile phone by a villager shows the tiger looking perfectly relaxed.
As people gathered for the spectacle of what would surely be a kill — either of animal or of humans — several men then climbed a tree above the house with a rope. Slowly they lowered a noose above the tiger’s head and secured the rope to the tree. At a given moment, the villagers then all started shouting and the tiger leapt forward in a desperate attempt to escape. But the noose tightened, and the rope, held by the tree, steadily began to strangle it.
Men then came forward and clubbed the beast senseless, but it took the strength of many people to hang it up and finally execute it.
“Everyone was astonished how big it was,” Selina said. “It was at least 8 feet [2.5m] long.”
If it was a human victory, it was one tinged with great sadness. This man-eater was a Bengal Royal, one of the largest of all tiger species, but this was hardly the magnificent beast of the forest seen on TV nature program; it was huge, but it was also old, thin and mangey, and had clearly come to the village half-starving.
“It was responsible for about half a dozen other deaths in recent months. It became a man-eater and every now and then it entered villages to look for prey,” said Rajesh Chakma, from the forestry department, who arrived later with colleagues and took away the body.
RSS