The Great Downpour

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVII

“I want to know what your policemen are doing to find my daughter,” Said Carmen to the Chief I.G. of police. She had come to his office at exactly thirty minutes past nine a.m., accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Tripathi. Her anger made the I.G. squirm in his seat.

“Please take a seat, Mrs. … er …”

“Miss Lancaster, if you please,” retorted Carmen.

“But, Madam, if you’re a miss, then how can you have a daughter …”

“My name and salutation is none of your concern, Sir.”

“Of course, of course, I am sorry to intrude on your privacy …”

“Please, Sir, I ask you to come to the point and tell me what your Police Force is doing to get my daughter back,” said an obviously distressed Carmen.

Mr. and Mrs. Tripathi were taken aback at Rati’s mother’s aggressiveness. They had welcomed her the previous night with open arms and an open mind. As there was a vacant room, they had even accommodated her for the night in their house. However, Mrs. Tripathi had noted with concern the smell of cigarette smoke that hung about the room when she had gone to wake up Carmen. She was about to tell her guest that smoking was not permitted in her house, but better sense and a feeling of camaraderie had stopped her in the nick of time.

Now, they looked at each other with surprise and glee as the I.G. began to sweat despite the very effective air-conditioning that was on.

“We are trying our best, Madam,” he began, but he knew it was a lost case against this woman who was out to embarrass him in front of civilians and his own subordinates, dammit!

Carmen immediately shouted him down with a few choice descriptions of the police force under him. The I.G. got up with an “Excuse me, madam; I think you are exceeding the limits of our patience.”

Carmen sat down with a resigned look at the I.G. She said, “I am sorry I was rude, Sir, but I have flown all the way from Paris to see some action. What I am able to gather is that there are three separate attempts being made to trace the lost students, but they have all yielded no results!”

“I would not go so far as to say that, Madam. We have just received the information that a cloth tied to a branch has been found at one point. Our forest department people as well as the Search and Rescue team are proceeding to that point to take a look at this apparent sign that the students may have left,” said the I.G.

“But is it not possible that this is not a sign at all? I mean, the Park is an open tourist destination, is it not? The so-called flag may be nothing more than just a churlish prank by an earlier visitor to the park. Am I right, Sir?”

“What you say may be right, but right now this is all that we have. Our Inspector Dubey from the Forest Department is also in touch with us. He tells us that …”

Carmen had just heard a name that had brought back memories of her past right into this room. She stopped breathing for a second.

The I.G. noticed her change of expression and stopped mid-sentence. He asked her in a much subdued voice what the matter was.

“What did you just say?” asked Carmen, now breathing more sedately than a moment earlier.

“What did I just say?” asked the I.G. rhetorically. “Oh, you mean about the policemen of the Forest …”

“No, what name did you just utter?”
“What name, Miss Lancaster?”

“The Inspector from the Forest Department. What was his name again?”

“Dubey. Why is that important? It is a fairly frequent name, Madam,” said the I.G.

“What is his first name? Please, I need to know, Sir.”

“I don’t know, but I can find out,” said the I.G. He rang a bell and called an assistant from the ante-chamber and asked him to find out the name of the Acting Chief Forest Officer and let him know right away. The assistant was back in less than a minute. He saluted the I.G. and announced the name.

“Vijay Dubey, Sir.” The I.G. nodded his head and dismissed him. He turned to face the French woman whose face had turned ashen at hearing the name.

“Are you all right, Madam,” he asked her.

Carmen recovered her composure and nodded. She added, “Is it possible for you to contact this person right away?”

“I think so, yes, but what is the matter?”

“Please, Sir, call him right now. I beg of you,” said Carmen.

The I.G. had his radio officer patch up a call to Inspector Dubey, now in the forest on foot with his two constables.

“Good morning, Inspector Dubey,” began the radio officer. “The Chief would like to talk to you, Over.” He finished, transferring the call to his boss.

The I.G. began with a terse greeting. He said, “There is a woman who is in my office. She wants to talk with you, Dubey. Over.

“Yes Sir. Who is it? Over.”

“She is a French national. She calls herself Miss Lancaster, Over.” said the I.G.

There was a long moment of radio silence.

“Dubey, are you there? Over.”

“Yes, I am, Sir. Did you say Lancaster?”

“Yes.”

Carmen requested the I.G. to be allowed to talk to the Inspector. The Chief had no option other than to hand over the hand-set to her.

“Hello Vijay. Is that you?” she asked.

“Oh my God! It is you, Carmen, is it not?”
“Yes, it is me,” replied Carmen. All business now, she added, “Do you know that our daughter Rati is one of the students who are lost in the Park?”

“No, I was not aware, Carmen,” answered Vijay, still reeling from the shock of hearing Carmen’s voice after a gap of nearly twenty years.

“The least I expect you to do is to see that your daughter is brought back safe,” said Carmen testily.

Inspector Vijay Dubey replied tersely, “If there is no other matter to discuss, I’d like to go back to my job. Over and out.”

The Chief I.G. of Police looked at Carmen Lancaster with newfound respect.

“I was unaware that he is your …” he began rather timidly.

“I need to go to Pench right now to assist my husband in rescuing my daughter,” said Carmen with a steely resolve.

The I.G. was taken aback by this request. He began to posture. According to him, this was not feasible or possible as Inspector Dubey and his team was already in the Forest. Besides, he added, the rope bridge that took people from the Seoni end of the Park to the Reserve Office was still not ready to cross over.

Carmen understood that going to Dubey from the Seoni end would be impossible. She then sought permission to join the helicopter team and reach the inside of the Park directly. The I.G. emphatically denied her the permission that she wanted.

“You have to wait here like the rest of the parents, Miss … er … Lancaster.”

“Okay, but I need to know the progress of the search every hour. Will that be possible?”

“Yes, fine, we’ll see that you are updated every half an hour.” The I.G. was hoping she would leave now.

Luckily for him, she did. Before she went, she left behind Mr. and Mrs. Tripathi’s address and telephone number.

“Be sure to call,” she said as she went out, accompanied by the Tripathis.

***

Both Nazima and Muhammad recoiled at the same instant when they heard the growl of the tiger from much closer than from where they had heard it the day before. The others heard it too. They all clustered together. Farhad removed the knife from his pants pocket and raised it above his head and shouted, “Come, you coward! What are you worried about?”

Almost everyone laughed at his comic stance and challenge. Sandesh brought them back to earth and said, “Okay friends, listen to me: this is obviously the growl of a tiger. At the moment, it seems he may be less than two kilometres away. We have to be on constant guard now. The tiger may or may not be a man-eating one. We have to assume that he or she will attack us, as we are in his/her area, and we are the intruders, not he/she. Farhad’s knife is of no use to us. We must devise other weapons to defend ourselves. Attacking a full-grown tiger is not a viable option.”

He paused and then continued.

“I know that tigers can be repelled by smoke and fire. We need to carry long sticks with pieces of cloth tied to one end of them. When a tiger comes in our vicinity, we can set fire to the stick and try to scare him/her away with that. The other options available to us are to run for our lives or to be eaten,” he finished.

Despite his predicament, Yash guffawed and said, “I will choose the “run” option!”

“Come on, Yash, don’t joke at this time,” said Bhairavi. She still had a mild swelling on her hand, but there had been no further problems and she felt all right too. Inwardly, she thanked God and Sandy for saving her life.

The group stayed close to each other as they slowly made progress. At one point, Sandesh even considered crossing over to the opposite bank of the river as a defense maneuver, but there was no convenient point at which to cross over; besides, crossing with the dead weight of Chand would be too risky for all three of them.

So they continued to plod ahead, mindful of the fact that danger lurked somewhere ahead of them.

***

The tigers came to a spot where they began to sense the presence of human-beings somewhere ahead of them. Rising Water began to get excited at the prospect of encountering humans. His consort was sated and tried to discourage him from pursuing human prey, which she knew was unreliable and sometimes dangerous.

Rising Water was, however, too keyed up; besides, his stomach was rumbling with hunger. It seemed the most natural thing for him to follow the scent of the humans that he had picked up (and which was growing stronger every moment), for it promised food for both of them.

What he failed to notice was the posse of policemen at his tail. Inspector Vijay Dubey and his constables were now just under half a kilometre behind them. Dubey had heard the growls of the tiger and wanted to capture them more than anything else, except for the safety of his daughter Rati.

What a surprise Carmen’s call had been! Come to think of it, he had never really stopped loving her. All through the last twenty years, he had remained celibate, except for a few nights out with professional women – that too at the instance of one of his bawdy friends. He had mourned the passing away of his mother just three and a half years ago, but by that time, his separation from his wife had been too far behind for him to call her again. He had never realized that his daughter would have grown to be a 20-year old woman! How fast time had flown!

Vijay Dubey finally spotted the tiger from a vantage point on the top of a machan that was erected for tourists to see wild animals at night. He realized that Rising Water was not alone, but accompanied by a smaller member of his species, probably a female. He and his constables kept up their pace such that they were just over 100 metres away from the trailing tiger.

The tigers, and behind them, Dubey and his team, kept going for at least another forty-five minutes. Then the tree-cover lessened and the tigers came face to face with the group of students about hundred-odd metres away.