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The fishing village of Chandpai has a problem tiger. It began by killing animals, 60 of them in the course of a few months -- goats, dogs, cattle. Then it killed an old woman, dragging her from her hut while she slept. And then, late last year, another victim: a man gathering fodder for his livestock at the forest's edge. Chandpai is the first stop in our weeklong journey to the far south, where the maps and the numbers and the projections will give way to real places and real people. And the tiger attacks on the village, we will discover, offer a kind of Bangladeshi environmental parable.
The village sits on a precarious promontory only a few feet above mean tide level, at the gateway to the Sundarbans forest. (There is some disagreement about the origin of the name, but most people think it means the forest of sundri trees -- the predominant species, which yields valuable red-colored timber, much favored for building fishing boats.) Some 3.5 million people live on the fringes of the Sundarbans, which straddle the India-Bangladesh border and form the largest contiguous expanse of mangroves in the world, covering more than 2,300 square miles.
For those who live in villages like Chandpai, the impenetrable mass of vegetation acts as a vital buffer against the fury of the cyclones that gather their strength from the Bay of Bengal. But in contrast to the rest of this overstuffed country, the Sundarbans themselves are free of human habitation, except for a few scattered patrol posts where government-appointed forest guards keep an eye out for illegal loggers, fishermen without permits, and dacoits, or river pirates.
The forest floor is three to six feet above sea level, and the tide inundates it twice a day. With a sea-level rise of 45 centimeters -- about 18 inches, which is at the conservative end of the most recent projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- three-quarters of the Sundarbans would be permanently lost. Sixty-seven centimeters (about 26 inches) and the entire forest is gone, obliterating not only that precious defense against cyclones but also one of the richest natural gene pools in the world. The Sundarbans are home to 334 species of plants, 186 birds, 53 reptiles, 222 different finfish, and 100 shellfish. The rarest creatures of all are the gigantic and endangered estuarine crocodile, of which no more than 200 survive, and the Bengal tiger, which numbers between 300 and 400. One of them is now frightening the wits out of the people of Chandpai.
Long before dawn I'm awakened by the grating clank of our anchor chain being raised. I roll over in my cramped bunk, lift the flap of the mosquito net, and squint at the illuminated dial of my alarm clock: 4:15. On the shore, half a mile away, Chandpai is beginning to stir; the first lights are already on, accompanied by the soft putt putt of a generator. Then the Bonbibi's engine kicks into life, coughing once or twice before settling into a loud, steady throb.
The little motor launch chugs slowly down the Passur River toward the Bay of Bengal. As the red orb of the sun rises above the treetops, I'm joined on deck by one of the two brown-uniformed forest guards who are along for our protection. He carries an ancient rifle, complete with bayonet and loaded with 40-year-old bullets; later we learn that there's about a one-in-four chance the weapon will fire successfully if we should encounter a tiger. Next to me on the bench seat is the copy of Heart of Darkness that my son insisted I pack, and Conrad's Congo comes easily to mind as the Bonbibi cuts its way through the mud-brown water, the dense tangle of forest.
A 20-foot crocodile, brutally armored, sunbathes on a mudbank. A troop of rhesus monkeys cavorts along a narrow beach. Spotted deer and wild boar browse in the shadows. At the junction of two larger rivers, a pod of rare Gangetic dolphins breaks surface. Several species of kingfisher -- blue-eared, black-capped, brown-winged, white-collared -- make sudden flashes of color in the lower branches of the mangroves. Gigantic, endangered adjutant storks prowl the shoreline on their spindly legs. Brahmini kites and sea eagles glide overhead. No tigers -- though later, near the remote forest post of Kotka, we will hike along an unnerving forest trail and see paw prints, dried-up scat, and deep claw marks in a tree, six feet above the ground.
The Bengal tiger has always been an object of terror. The male can weigh 500 pounds or more and reach 10 feet in length. During the spring tides it may pick fights with crocodiles. It can swim as far as five miles in search of prey and it can climb into fishing boats.
The Bonbibi is named for the goddess of the Sundarbans, who is believed to control the tiger's movements. In certain villages on the edge of the forest, Bonbibi is depicted as a Hindu goddess wearing a green or blue sari and seated on a howling tiger, her countenance peaceful and serene. Next to her, her brother, Shajangali, carries a club to drive away the tiger. He is dressed, in one scholar's description, "like a member of the Muslim gentry." This intermingling of religious traditions is typical of Bengal.
Many of those who venture into the forest to make their tenuous living -- the fishermen, woodcutters, and honey collectors -- will conduct elaborate rituals before they leave home, imploring Bonbibi to protect them. Anthropologists have documented ceremonies in which a variety of ritual objects are gathered and offered to the goddess -- conch-shell bangles, vermilion, scraps of red cloth, green coconuts, earthen pots, sweetmeats, hemp, incense. In the Indian section of the Sundarbans, there was a brief experiment in which forest workers tried wearing a mask on the back of the head -- the idea being to confuse the tiger, which likes to attack from behind. There is no evidence that this, or the prayers to Bonbibi, or any other protective measures, have made any difference.
Official reports say that several dozen people fall victim to the tigers each year. But many more deaths go unreported. The honey collectors, the mowalis, are especially vulnerable. They come here for two months each year, in April and May, pursuing the rock bees that swarm south from the Himalayas in search of the nectar-bearing flowers of the holly mangrove (Acanthus ilicifolius) and the river mangrove (Aegiceras corniculata). Once the mowalis have paid the forest service for their permits and given the forest guards and government officials their cut, each man may bring back 200 pounds or more of honey. That will fetch about 5,000 takas, or close to $75, for two months of unthinkably dangerous work. (The annual per capita income in Bangladesh is $520.) The mowalis work singly or in pairs, deep in tiger territory. Their presence is especially disruptive at this time of year, since the cubs are only a couple of months old and are still in their dens. The first attacks, then, are likely to be defensive, but the kill will convert the tiger from a "circumstantial" to a "dedicated" man-eater.
The mowalis, their fellow villagers, and the forest guards all agree that the tigers have become more aggressive of late, more willing to enter human settlements in search of prey. Though there's no hard data to confirm this yet, they also agree on the reason -- the steady degradation of the tiger's habitat, made worse by Cyclone Sidr, which hit this part of Bangladesh last November. Freshwater supplies are diminished, the forest cover is disrupted, populations of spotted deer (the tiger's main prey) are depleted. And there's the parable in the clash between man and tiger: the overall health of the Sundarbans ecosystem, the survival of its top predator, the livelihood of the population, and the continued habitability of the land are all inextricably intertwined.
A few miles from Chandpai, a small boat pulls over next to the Bonbibi. The boatman tosses a rope across the gap and ties up. It's a surprise to see another Western face on board, one of only a handful we've seen in this unvisited country. He introduces himself as Adam Barlow, an English-born tiger expert from the University of Minnesota. He's on his way to Chandpai to teach villagers how to protect themselves while also protecting the endangered animal. The goal is to anesthetize the problem tiger, put a radio collar on it, and return it to the forest.
"What's their usual way of dealing with the problem?" I ask.
He answers, "Normally they put out bait for the tiger. Then, when they've lured it into the village, they gather by the hundreds and arm themselves with sticks. Then they beat the tiger to death."
The captain of the Bonbibi puts us ashore at Sarankhola, a village on the northeastern edge of the Sundarbans. There's been tiger trouble here, too: a 15-year-old boy from the adjoining village of Khuriakhali, killed while out fishing. Perhaps 8,000 people live in each of the two villages, Muslims and a minority of Hindus appearing to coexist in striking harmony. The Muslim homes are simple, those of the Hindu families sturdier and more ornate, painted in vivid primary colors, with fenced vegetable gardens and carefully tended shrines in adjacent huts. Both groups are endlessly hospitable, inviting visitors into their homes with offers of biscuits, fruit, and small cups of sweet black tea.
As we walk along a narrow, elevated path -- a shoelace of doughy, yielding gray mud raised eight or ten feet above parallel rows of fishponds -- people tell me a story that could be repeated with little variation in hundreds of other villages. They grow two rice crops a year, a few vegetables. They fish for depleted stocks. They venture into the forest to cut timber and firewood. They're still catching their breath from Sidr.
Even by Bangladesh's exaggerated standards, Cyclone Sidr was a monster. It's impossible to ascribe Sidr or Hurricane Katrina or any specific storm directly to global warming. But like Katrina, the cyclone can be seen only as a harbinger of more and worse to come. Ocean surface temperatures, which incubate these giant storms, are rising in the Bay of Bengal, just as they are in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
The early-warning system worked reasonably well, says a middle-aged man who is old enough to remember the catastrophes of 1970 and 1991. That's why fewer than 4,000 died this time (although more than 150,000 were injured and a million tons of rice were lost). From the radio, the villagers knew the cyclone was coming a full two days before it made landfall. A three-tier system of red flags in the main population centers indicated the likely strength of the storm. Government officials and the villagers themselves then spread the word more widely via handheld bullhorns and bicycle-mounted loudspeakers. Right up to the last minute, however, no one knew exactly where the storm would hit. As it happened, the villages around Sarankhola and Khuriakhali took the brunt of it.
Sidr came suddenly, at 10:30 on the night of November 15. Most of the old people, the women, the children made it to the cyclone shelters, raised 10 feet above the ground on concrete pillars. But 14 people in Khuriakhali failed to reach safety, the man tells me as we continue our walk along the raised path. These unlucky ones were trapped in their homes, reluctant to abandon their meager possessions, or swept away and drowned by the fast-rising water. "It came up to here," the man says, indicating his collarbone. The winds reached 135 miles per hour.
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