Just above us, two squadrons of mosquitoes were battling out each other like dive bombers with the same ferocity and veracity as seen or rather heard in the Battle of Britain. Not far below them, the principal target of their sting operation, our four tortured souls were sitting up on a tree, awake and waiting desperately for any sort to incident to happen that would justify our present status.

          This was supposed to be a hunting expedition and we were supposed to be the hunters. Yet till now, all the hunting we had done consisted of a cumulative attempt of killing half a dozen fat lazy and bloody mosquitoes. It wasn’t at all comfortable being perched on a tree top canopy and peering at what was a hazy outline of a goat tied to a tree. May be it wasn’t comfortable for the goat too but it didn’t seem to bother too much about it. It behaved very much like Ravi who was squatting beside me, trying to act brave, smart, indifferent and stoic to all those mosquito bites on his ass and all the sleepless nights on the tree tops. He had my grandfather’s gun and was sticking his nose against its hammer, pointing it somewhere towards the goat as if he was a sniper from a James Bond movie aiming a telescopic rifle to kill the goat.  Beside him was his brother-in-law Sanjay who had led us into this menace and now was using the butt end of a double barreled rifle like Errol Flynn to protect himself from mosquitoes. The other soul who seemed to be in the most comfortable position in such a awkward situation was Pandeyji, who had come to help us out but was now fast asleep and was unconsciously trying to develop some sort of irritating symphony  with his snores and the buzzing of the mosquitoes. I was trying to figure out what level of stupidity it was of me to agree to this catastrophic plan.

          It all started the fateful day when Aunt Ruby summoned me to gift the gun that Ravi was aiming at that indifferent goat. It was a double barrel Remington Model 700 Magnum with bullets almost the same size as that of an Eveready torch cell and grandfather used it for shooting man eaters of Hazaribagh Reserve forest. After he finished with them and drove his jeep down a 200 feet deep cliff, grandmother used it (sans it bullets) in the reverse way with a mop on its barrel end to clean cobwebs in the corner of the rooms. Anyway since it was getting relatively heavy for a frail bodied grandma to lift the gun and drive away spiders and other crawling creatures from the walls of the house, her only daughter Aunt Ruby decided to dispose the gun and get a regular wall mop instead. And since the best way of disposing anything undesirable meant giving it to me, I was summoned and handed over the gun with the duster intact on its barrels with stern instructions to be careful with the gun as well as take proper care of it. The parting however made grandma overtly sentimental and after a few futile attempts to weep, she began to narrate all the adventures and misadventures that the gun had suffered while playing the dual role of grandfather’s gun and grandma’s wall mop.  This wasn’t humanly tolerably and so I had to escape with an excuse of getting late for work after cutting her emotional recollections midway.

          A semi-employed geologist like me had very little use and knowledge of a gun and though I felt tempted a couple of times to use it on my annoying, pestering, arrogant and hippopotamus shaped landlady, I controlled my feelings thinking about all the dire consequences that would follow if the gun failed me. And anyway the gun wasn’t supposed to shoot anything more dangerous than a man eater. As a result the existence of the gun was soon forgotten and it was ingloriously dumped in a corner of the room along with a bunch of other disposable gifts bequeathed to me by Aunt Ruby. This was until Ravi unearthed it a few months later from the garbage heap that had started to develop under my bed and got rid of the flora and fauna that had began to prosper harmoniously within its barrels.

“Why are you hiding a gun under your bed?”

Ravi had this very much irritating habit of suspecting everything in a criminal point of view. Even the old beggar with the stick in Civil lines would be some sort of KGB agent with a semi automatic rifle concealed in his stick. Cervantes, if he was alive might have written a sequel to The Adventures of Don Quixote with Ravi as the hero and it would have easily made it to the best selling list. Ravi was a journalist and had been employed in the Coalfield Times but that was until he was been ceremoniously kicked out from it for failing to show any proofs to support his report on Sicilian mafia invading Durgapur to loot the National Bank. Now that he is unemployed he calls himself a freelancer and tries to find out anything remotely suspicious or any clues to any nonexistent mystery so that he could write a report about it. That day however he had invaded my room in search for some money that he could spend on his birthday party and when he failed to recover anything he emptied half of my tin of biscuits and started to search the room for something more edible until he found the gun.

When I explained how I had got the gun and that it wasn’t hidden under my bed but kept there with utmost care and that it was used to shoot only man eaters and not man kind and also for the last decade its primary job was to help in shooing away spiders and lizards and even lesser wall life, Ravi got a bit dejected at the loss a such a good story.   He probably had already started framing some sort of an exclusive report with a scintillating headline, something like “Deadly gun found under bed of an out of work geologist” or ”Deadly geologist sleeping over an out of work gun”. Anyway my explanations turned his focus more towards the gun and he began examining it with the same panache as Sherlock Holmes would do a murder weapon and came to a conclusion that it was a hunting gun, which I had already told him. After finishing with it, he cocked up the gun, took careful aim at me, pushed up the bolt and pulled the trigger. The gun wasn’t loaded but Ravi managed to get his finger trapped between the trigger and its rusty socket and started a wild African type dance around my room disbursing choicest slangs in a very much flowery Saharanpuri accent. This subsided after a few moments with his departure with a promise to come again the next day with some sort of plan which were always complicated and troublesome. It was only after his exit that I realized that Imtiyaz was probably the one and only first and last human casualty of the gun.

The next evening he returned inevitably like Halley’s Comet this time with a proposal to accompany him on a hunt in Hazaribagh.  This was automatically turned down but then he began to hit at my roots, with an implication that I was really a coward grandson of a fearless grandfather. This too was parried with some discomfort but after that he began to plead me for going with him since he desperately needed to write a report on something and a hunt according to him would make an interesting copy This was followed by a barrage of sentimental adjectives like merciless, selfish, fifth columnist, ungrateful, unthankful and so on and eventually I had to agree to his plans to stem that barrage of verbose attacks which were almost like US carpet bombing of Iraq. It was mutually agreed that whatever hunting would be done will be done by Ravi and I would merely be there to write about the proceedings and give him moral support if he really needed that. Most of the hunting would be done by him and his brother in law Sanjay who had been so kind to guide us in our hunting expedition. In those days Maneka Gandhi wasn’t around to protect animal rights, neither were animals aware of the existence of Maneka Gandhi, hence hunting was comparably safe for the hunter and since my role was merely of a vestigial type I  finally did agree to this trip.

          The next few days were used up for planning and procurement of the trip, with Ravi drawing up lists and I censoring them and trying to strike a balance between his lists and our carrying capacity. His lists even included an entire 3 volume omnibus of Jim Corbett, which he told would serve as a ready reckoner while hunting. Whatever it was for, I found it extremely difficult to visualize Ravi with the gun in one hand confronting a man eater type of tiger and simultaneously consulting Jim Corbett’s books to decide what to do next and at the same time believing that the tiger would politely and patiently wait for him to finish with the book before attacking. In any case it was difficult for him to complete all those books before setting on his hunting trip and going by the rate at which he reads it might have taken an entire decade to complete them. I suggested putting them below his head during sleeping so that some material from the book might enter his head like it does in osmosis but then he told there might be a reverse case in which something might have come out of his head and get into the book, that would leave his head entirely empty like a hollow coconut. This seemed a very much likely phenomenon and hence my suggestion was overruled. Anyway, the final list of essential items required during hunting compiled after much censuring and editing seemed as if it would require something about the size of Titanic to carry them from Durgapur to Hazaribagh.

As per our plan we were to find out Sanjay at the Hazaribagh station. That however didn’t turn out to be a major problem at all. He was so prominent and conspicuous that half the station was crowded around him staring at him as if witnessing some sort of extraterrestrial alien that had just landed at the Hazaribagh station. He really was a spectacular type of sight, decked up from top to bottom in a full hunting uniform complete with a wide brimmed hat, knee high hunting boots and a double barreled Winchester rifle, looking somewhat of a cross between Jim Corbett and Shambhu Shikari and standing in wide daylight in the midst of a crowded railway platform as if expecting to hunt man-eaters then and there.

It took some sort of substantial amount of effort as well as time to get ourselves out of the station, considering the crowd pulling status of Sanjay but once we settled down at the Circuit House it was discovered that Sanjay too had never ventured inside any sort of jungle. He was here just to do a case study on hunting and that was to open up a new concept of event management called Hunting Management. The dress up in that hunting suit was just to gain the feel of it or rather in his words to assess the ambience of it. Sanjay was a manager in a coal mining company in Calcutta and as per him and the laws of good management it really is necessary to gain some feel of an operation before venturing in it and that was what he was practicing at the station. I tried to figure out the consequences if Sanjay went a step further in his management practices and began to use his Winchester on us to gain some more feel. The consideration seemed to be too much dangerous and hence I thought it best to leave it alone.

The next steps of Ravi’s hunting plans were all hijacked by Sanjay. He told that he had chalked it up all and laid down a paper before us with a big flow diagram that seemed quite incomprehensible to us but actually was the blueprint of the hunting trip. There were different levels of planning in it, a macro one consisting of different micro plans and then a contingency plan to every micro one and that ultimately ended up in the same place where it all began. Like all good managers in this planet Sanjay too had done a meticulous but incomprehensible and impractical type of planning and most of his plans were duly filled up with abstract managerial jargons that could mean anything or nothing if translated to a layman’s language. The ultimate conclusion of his plan was something like sitting on a tree, waiting for a man eating tiger sort of thing to appear and shooting it down to kill it. It really seemed incredibly remarkable how all the theories of management could conclude in something so simple and similar to that we had planned without any help of any managerial ideas.

The circuit house Manager contributed more to our plans by adding Pandeyji to our troupe, saying that he would be something like Tenzing Norgay to us in the jungle. Pandeyji anyhow didn’t invoke any sort of confidence like Tenzing Norgay and seemed more content in falling asleep anytime and anywhere rather than guiding us. Nevertheless it was Pandeyji who informed us that there wasn’t any man eating tiger around to shoot but only a leopard that had been stealing cattle from nearby villages and had turned quite into a menace. There wasn’t any fixed area to find it but if we were to hunt it we might have to roam around a few areas. This seemed to disappoint Sanjay to some extent as he had to change or rather rephrase his plans since his objective had changed from a man eater to a cattle eater

After all due clearances from the forest office the hunt began with all four along with a goat being dropped in the part of a jungle near a village in which Pandeyji got news that the leopard had dragged away a cow and might return to get another one. A machan or canopy had been set up on a sal tree near a village and a water hole and we (that is except the goat) were to sit up on it and wait for the leopard. The goat was to serve as bait to the leopard on his way to the village and if the leopard stopped to dine on it then we would aim and shoot it.

It was evening when we climbed up the tree and settled down on top of the machan. The forest around was colorful, ablaze with the flame of the forest in full bloom and multicolored birds flying in flocks from one tree to another. Far away across the western sky, the sun was about to set behind the pegmatitic hills reddening the entire horizon beyond the tree line. A few deers grazed past our tree totally unconscious of our presence. It all seemed an environment of peace and quite but that was only until the sun set. As soon as it became dark, the entire forest that had seemed peaceful and sleepy an hour ago became awake and active with sounds of wild birds, deer and sometimes some unknown and unseen animals. Both the guns were with Ravi and Sanjay and I had been told just to note the proceedings and write it later. Pandeyji had duly fallen asleep and the goat was busy grazing and sniffing around the forest air.

It was a half moon might winter night and the air was heavily with the intoxicating scent of mahua. Faint sounds of drum beats from the inhabitants of a nearby Santhal village celebrating some sort of festival could be heard. These gradually became fainter as night fell and were replaced by the sounds of the inhabitants of the jungle. The moonlight filtering through the tree tops created a panorama of light and shade that made the forest appear treacherous and haunting. Even the sounds of harmless barking deer and the screeching of an owl seemed to put us on tenterhooks. Sometimes all the sounds died down and there suddenly was an interlude of eerie awkward silence which seemed to be more disturbing than the jungle noise.

Ravi got a bit impatient sitting so long without any effect and asked Sanjay if he had any contingency measures to deal with the mosquitoes and the darkness. However Sanjay hadn’t considered these variables in his plan and hence there wasn’t any solution to Ravi’s problems. Anyway, it really was getting uncomfortable sitting cramped up and sleepless on a tree top for such a long time and till now there wasn’t any sign of the leopard that was the objective of Sanjay’s and to some extent Ravi’s plan.  The discomfort due to our posture was further enhanced by several magnitudes on seeing Pandeyji sleeping peacefully heedless to all our distresses. Sometimes there was a nagging feeling of replacing the goat with Pandeyji. The goat might have served a better purpose if it was cooked and eaten rather than using it as bait to a non existent leopard. Sanjay was still battling it out with the mosquitoes and Ravi aiming at the goat like James Bond. The outline of the goat gradually became indistinct and hazy in the darkness and I probably inducted by Pandeyji fell asleep for the first time on the top of a tree.

I might have been asleep for an hour or may be five minutes, it is difficult and unnecessary to calculate time in a jungle but suddenly the forest came alive with all sorts of activity. Birds that were sleeping in nests woke up and chirped loudly, monkeys on tree tops started chattering violently and the pack of deers grazing carelessly below our tree vanished inside the jungle. Everything seemed to be on a high alert in a rather intensely charged atmosphere anticipating some sort of happening, everything except of course our happily snoring guide Pandeyji. Suddenly that goat that had been nonchalantly digesting forest grass began to bleat furiously in a terrified sort of way. From whatever was visible in the faint moonlight I was just able to discern a faint shadow of a beast trying to sneak up on our goat.

Excited with all these happenings and observations I tried to warn Ravi and Sanjay and may be the goat by shouting something like ‘Lookout, a tiger’. That was when all the confusion started and a lot of things happened simultaneously. The beast that actually was our objective leopard got startled and frightened by my yell left the goat alone and with loud snarls rushed towards our tree trying to climb it. Pandeyji disturbed by these loud snarls jolted out of his dreamland state, lost his balance and fell forward with his full one quintal body mass on top of Sanjay. Sanjay could not adjust himself to the sudden change in momentum due to Pandey, got pinned to floor of our machan and let go his grip on his Winchester rifle dropping it from the tree. Ravi, still now in his sniper like position,  shocked with the suddenness of all happenings accidentally pressed the trigger, firing the gun with a loud bang unsettling everybody on the machan first by the sound and then by the recoil of it.  This was followed by a thunderous and fearful roar of the leopard and the abrupt end to the goat’s bleating. Then again it was an interlude of the disturbing silence as if the jungle was waiting for everything to return to normalcy. It took us quite a few moments to settle down and figure out the developments. The only things that registered to me were that the leopard had vanished and the goat seemed dead.

It wasn’t until morning that we realized what really had happened in those few moments of chaos and confusion.  When we alighted from night long perch the circuit house manager and a forest officer were there to find us, worried about our state and they reported seeing the leopard lying about 500mts away from the tree not dead but  unconscious without any bloody wound. Sanjay’s gun had behaved like a freely falling object obeying all Laws of Newton and Murphy and had landed spot on the leopards head. The leopard presumably believing that the sky had fallen on his head ran off leaving us and the goat alone but the impact of the gun probably made it senseless. Meanwhile the shot accidentally fired from Ravi’s gun went straight through the goat killing it out rightly.

Anyway, that was how our hunt ended. Ravi’s objective of writing a report on the hunt didn’t work. Neither did Sanjay’s idea of Hunting Management become any leading management  concept. The only object that got hunted was our goat that was eventually cooked and eaten mostly by Pandeyji though a few morsels did reach us. As for the leopard, it was learnt to have recovered from the shock but had lost its memory. Last heard it had given up the habit of stealing animals from the village and was seen to graze along side them.