When Leopards Roam the Metropolis (Conclusion)
People adapt. But attacks still sometimes happen.
by Richard Conniff
People living in and around Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park learn to adapt their behaviors for co-existing with free-roaming leopards. So-called “tribals,” or indigenous people, tend to be smarter about this than newcomers to the city. They keep children indoors after 7 or 7:30 p.m. When they have to relieve themselves after dark, “nobody will go alone,” said Resha Satish Kulkarni, in Chuna Pada, a small village inside the park. “And first, they will check the area with a torch”—that is, a flashlight. Her husband, a kidney patient, needed to go out in the night 15 days earlier. “So I went along. There was a leopard sitting at a mango tree. I saw it first because of the light in its eyes.” She kept her light trained on the leopard, as if to say, “Yes, I know you’re there.” But she didn’t tell her husband at first because he was city-reared, not tribal, and “because he would be scared. Later, I said, ‘O.k., if you are done, here’s a leopard and you can move.’” They returned to the house without incident.
Narrow escapes are common. Another tribal woman, Draupadi Mahadev Kamadi, was accompanying her seven-year-old daughter out to relieve herself. But when she turned away for a moment to get water, a leopard immediately pounced on the child. Kamadi, a slight, demure woman who would not weigh 100 pounds if her floral-print sari was soaking wet, leaped screaming onto the leopard’s back. The terrified leopard ran off. The child survived with claw marks on her back and face.
Ankush Ramchandra Ahire was attacked as a six-year-old, but saved by neighbors. His parents sent him back to his rural village, because they thought it was safer than living inside Sanjay Gandhi National Park. But when he returned to the park six months later, a leopard attacked him again. Now he has a bite mark across his face and another on his chest, and his admiring friends joke that the leopard must have been a lover from a former life who wanted him back. They call him Waghya, meaning something like “leopard boy.”
It is of course possible to prevent such incidents. “Solve the problem of nature calls, and eighty percent of the leopard incidents will go away,” said my guide Krishna Tiwari, who grew up just outside Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Using the outskirts of villages for a toilet not only brings people into the leopard’s territory, but when they squat it reduces them to the leopard’s normal prey size.
Regular trash removal would also help, to prevent garbage from building up in great swales around the informal settlements. “People are throwing the garbage,” said Tiwari, “and that’s why the dogs are there, and that’s why the leopards are there.” But public toilets, trash removal, electric power, water supply, and other features of urban life require public money. In India’s “vote bank” politics, a local politician will sometimes push that kind of improvement on the understanding that the villagers will thank him with their votes. But India is home to 1.4 billion people, and a large percentage of its 300 million households lack toilets. For the five years through 2019, the national government funded a “Clean India” plan to install toilets in 90 million homes. But that has only begun to fix the problem.
Improvements would also tend to make permanent what are ostensibly temporary developments, all of them a product of urban populations sprawling over areas that were until recently rural parkland, and into areas that have been home to leopards forever. Scores of thousands of homes now occupy the park itself. There are plans to remove these encroachers—if Mumbai could only find someplace else to put them. Meanwhile, the population builds up like a noose tightening around the park.
Playing devil’s advocate, I asked why Mumbai didn’t just do the obvious thing and remove the leopards. The reaction was shocked silence: In a country as densely populated as India, there is no place else to put them, and research has demonstrated that relocating leopards just makes them confused and dangerous. But I think the shock had more to do with a deeply-felt sense that the lives of leopards matter as much to them as ours do to us, with no clear reason to set one above the other.
For Mumbai, that means learning to coexist will remain an essential survival skill for humans and leopards alike well into the future.
Postscript:
It was tea break one afternoon near the end of my visit in Mumbai. I was visiting a business park chockablock with new 35-story skyscrapers topped with Greek temples. On the seventh-floor deck of one building, 20-something tech workers took turns playing foosball and studying the forested hillside in back through a brass ship captain’s spyglass.
They were looking at a leopard, also on tea break, up a favorite tree, where it liked to loaf many afternoons around 4:30. That is, it was a wild leopard living unfenced and apparently well fed in the middle of the city. It had taken up residence on the hilltop forest patch, roughly 100 acres in area, after having apparently wandered here five or so miles through densely populated neighborhoods from the national park. When I hiked up to the forest next day with translator Krishna Tiwari, we passed through a massive slum, whose residents routinely used the same forest as a bush toilet. And yet the leopard seemed to have mastered the art of avoiding people, going out by night to pick off dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, rats and other camp followers of human civilization. It could not last. Developers in Mumbai are relentless and powerful. Heavy construction equipment was already nibbling away at the far end of the hill, and someone had fenced off a private helipad up top.
I learned later that the leopard had been trapped and taken to a rescue center, a kind of prison for leopards that get in the way of what the developers like to call “progress.”