PERSONAL ESSAY | MEMOIR
Ruminating About My Wrongs in Engaging With Wildlife
Sloth Bears in Hampi, the Victory City
I’d gone to Hampi to see the sloth bear.
Hampi is the name now in vogue for Vijayanagara, which means Victory City. Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, “Victory City,” is set in Vijayanagara, the capital of a kingdom that spanned all of peninsular India. Its time of glory was over five-hundred years ago.
Victorious and ever-prospering for over two centuries, the kingdom fell in hours on a single, fateful day, crushed by the combined armies of five neighbouring sultanates. The battle wasn’t about extending boundaries; it was waged to settle grievances. To fire up its fighters, the invaders of Vijayanagara dangled before them the promise of loot of one of the wealthiest cities of the time.
The pillage lasted long, was thorough, and left Vijayanagara in complete ruin. The kingdom disintegrated, the city was never rebuilt, and it came to be called Hampi in that desolate avatar.
Rushdie has taken that kingdom’s myths, legends, and histories and reimagined them into a piece of magic realism. His principal characters spend long years in thick forests with giant trees and fantastic creatures a horse ride out from Vijayanagara.
These days, the trees in the forests around Hampi are less imposing and not so dense. The beasts that roam there are the sloth bear, the cheetah, and the wild boar. There’s no elephant, no tiger. But for the beasts they host, the forests and boulder-laden hills offer excellent concealment, hunting, and foraging. Riparian Hampi is itself an enchanting sight of rocks, ridges, and ancient ruins, and home to bears and rare birds.
A reserve has been marked out for sloth bears near Hampi, and I’d arrived there at 3:00 into a sleepy afternoon. And, even as we approached a hide created for photographers, the sloth bears came waggling down a hill ahead, skirting around boulders in their path.
Sloth bears forage at night, walking ten or twenty kilometres for berries and termites. At the hide, their target was the treats the guides had organised for them — pasted on tree trunks, spread on the grass. I settled in the hide — a metal cage with narrow cut-outs for telephoto lenses. The guides sat on a second hide on top, where I could tell they’d dissolved into their phones.
At nature reserves in Kanha in the north and at Bhadra and Kabini in the south, naturalists had told me: the tiger is shy; he’ll walk away when he senses people, but the sloth bear and the wild boar will tear you, gore you.
Here I was, a short sprint from them, safe as in town, watching their two-inch claws, flakes of dirt on their shabby fur, their maw.
The guides prodded me from above. Stand-up shot, sir! Sitting! Fighting! Peacock background! Mongoose!
A half-dozen peafowl had entered the scene. The large birds have proliferated everywhere; the number of their predators must’ve fallen. Quick and shy grey mongoose came and went and came back, making short dashes, jumping onto the rocks, jumping off.
After a while, the bears tired and climbed back the hill a few paces, found a rock each to hug, and went to sleep.
“Shall we go, sir?” a somnolent voice called from above.
“To the viewpoint,” I said.
“There, you can’t see bears like this, sir. Can see only forest and rocks.”
“Let’s see forests and rocks,” I said. “Bears come down those rocks, right?”
I’d read that somewhere.
“We’ll look for leopard,” they said.
And I was ready for a change of scene, even if my experience until now with the bears had been like time at the zoo.
We searched for the leopard from the car, driving slowly, focusing on caves and ledges in the tall hills. We looked hard with bare eyes and binoculars. We saw no cat. But I was content with the wash of an orange glow about us, brought on by evening light on that magical terrain.
I hired a private guide the following morning, for birds. We went to a narrow road by a canal dug through hilly terrain. The guide knew Eagle-Owls live on cliff faces there — cliffs caused by canal-making. He kept a Bluetooth speaker over his car and played the bird’s calls using the Merlin app. He drove up and down, and we got an owl after nearly an hour. It was perched on top, almost at eye level with us. After my first burst of shots, it flew, and we chased after it and found it lower among the sharp, jutting, cut-up rocks. It stared up at us with large, yellow-ringed eyes. It didn’t stay beyond another single burst; it took wing, and we followed. And so it went.
After I’d taken my last shot of this remarkable large bird, I noticed the expression in its eyes for what it was: annoyance, contempt even.
This was no way to love a bird, and there was no chance we’d win its respect or welfare like this. I agreed readily when the guide asked if we should go. But I sat up in anticipation when he drove into barren thorny fields some distance away, with no regard for his tyres, to get me to the socially-inclined Painted Sandgrouse with the necklace around their necks.
When he found them, he drove the car round and round the flock, working for angles for my pictures. The following morning, he took me to Matanga Hill for the Yellow-throated Bulbul, endemic to a mere few places, Hampi among them. Again the guide snared them with his phone.
That was two weeks ago. Yellow-throated Bulbuls, Painted Sandgrouse, Francolins and other birds that I saw there often flit before my mind’s eye, but a persistent another image lodged there dominates — the reproof in the Eagle-Owl’s eyes.
As if it warns against a repeat ruination of a charmed place.
