“Gulzar? No. He couldn’t have,” says the woman, as she stares down from the machan. She holds a monocular to her right eye, as her gloved left hand swats yet another mosquito. Crushed, the insect leaves a smidge of blood on her cheek.

“Why wouldn’t you believe me? Just listen to the lyrics again,” says the man standing next to her.

He wipes the trace of blood from her face and hands her a half-squeezed tube of mosquito repellent gel. She dabs some of it over her face, the only exposed part of her body, which is otherwise covered by a pair of rugged pants and a thick flannel shirt. Her lean, sinewy hands rest on the machan’s ledge, as she casually feels the contours of the knot of a thick rope. One end of the rope is coiled and tied to the ledge.

It’s pitch dark. But there are sounds aplenty, other than their hushed whispers. Disparate sounds, of insects one would never know about, of animals big and small, of birds who found some reason to wake up at night, owls who had every reason to be awake and of the wind rustling through the leaves, all came together to somehow make sense that night.

They were in the sanctum sanctorum of the Mhalshe wildlife sanctuary in Ponda, the core heart of the forest, where only the jungle throbbed, ruled and survived. And the three of them, the lean, fit woman, the man wearing denims and a hiker’s jacket who had invoked Gulzar and a third, a fat, bearded man, curled up in a foetal position in one corner of the machan, were lying in wait for the sanctuary’s prime deity -- the last surviving tigress of the forests of Go-aah.

He whispers to her again.

“Zabaan pe laga laga re

Zabaan pe laga laga re namak ishq ka

Haaye re tere ishq ka

Namak ishq ka

Haaye re tere ishq ka

(I've tasted...

Tasted the salt of your love

Sigh, your love

For the salt of your love

Sigh, of your love)

“The salt of love, what else can that be?” says the man in the jacket, humming the lines again, his tone softer and precise this time.

“Salt… hmmm… Maybe their collective sweat,” she whispers back, her eyes still scanning the darkness.

“Then how do you explain the next few lines…

Balam se manga re

Balam se manga manga re

Namak ishq ka tere ishq ka

Haaye re tere ishq ka”.

(I asked my lover,

I asked my lover, I did.

For the salt of your love

Sigh... your love)

“She’s specifically seeking salts from the guy….”

They hear a sound from somewhere below the machan, which is around 20 feet above the forest’s floor, littered with rotting leaves and organic debris. There’s a small watering hole nearby. That’s where the sound came from.

“Is she here yet?” the fat man whispers. His eyes are still closed.

“It’s just a red jungle fowl,” she says, turning towards him. “Will you goddamn wake up? At least the snoring will stop,” the woman kicks him lightly.

“I am awake. And that sound, by the way… that wasn’t me snoring. It’s that guy,” the fat man points towards the end of the thick rope, which fades into the dark of the night. “I think he’s choking on his own puke.”

“Let him,” she says. She jerks the rope a bit. The gagging gets louder and then stops.

“And just so you know, I agree with our friend here. Gulzar was one of India’s greatest lyricists and his Namak Ishq Ka is an ode to oral sex,” the fat man insists.

“You guys have lost it. Gulzar must have been 120 years old or something when he wrote that song,” she counters.

“A guy can’t stop wishing, whatever the age,” the man in the hikers’ jacket shoots back, before the night sounds suddenly vanish. The almost deathly quiet is broken only by the constant chirping of crickets.

“I think it’s time. Hand me the flashlight and the knife.”

The fat man, wearing a multi-pocket photographer’s vest, fishes the items out of his pockets and hands her both. He then digs inside another cavity in his vest, fishing out a covered plastic cup and twisting it open.

“Damn! Not serradura again! This is your sixth cup tonight.”

“You are a commando. What do you know about low blood sugar and stress?” he quietly rebuts, while scooping out the dessert with a spoon that’s attached to the cup.

“Blessed be my mother who shared her recipe with me”.

The man wearing the hikers’ jacket finger-scoops the dessert from the fat man’s cup and licks it.

“Umm… Ok, quick question. What do you think will kill you? Diabetes or a tiger?”

“A tiger with a sweet tooth, perhaps”.

He places the used cup alongside the scattered remains of the five others on the edge of the machan floor.

Suddenly, the wind brings a sharp warning cry of a sambhar to the machan. The trio looks in that direction. There is nothing in sight. That’s how tigers prowl, when they are on a hunt. Blending into the jungle, until they sneak up on their prey. Somewhat like how Monday sneaks up after a weekend.

And tonight, the last tigress in Goa’s jungles would get her prey alright. Irrespective of whether she hunted or not.

It’s cold. They rub their gloved hands together to keep warm.

They hear movement some distance away, as if a large animal were making its way slowly through the bushes to the south.

“Here we go,” the commando whispers, as she turns to look at her friends. “Are you guys ready?”

“It’s too late to turn back anyway.”

“First visual confirmation of the tiger and I drop him, right,” she asks.

“Yeah. But wait. I want to see the bastard hanging one last time. Turn the light on him.”

The beam catches the suspended figure right in the face. A slight wind swings the rope he is hanging from, like a jaded pendulum on its last few oscillations.

The man’s hands are tied behind his back. His head is covered with a weathered, full-face helmet, but his face is pale, sweating with agony, anger and fear. Occasionally, strands of his thick moustache appear to bristle with anger and then tremble with pain, when he lets out a laboured breath. His warm breath, pungent with puke, regularly coats the helmet’s visor with vapour, which vanishes when he breathes in. In those moments, when the visor is unclouded, you can see his dilated pupils gleam darker than the night around him.

The white piece of gauze stuffed in his mouth has turned yellowish with his vomit. As he begs for mercy through his eyes, his mouth contorts in an effort to scream for help.

The man in the hiker’s jacket jerks the rope a bit and the man starts swinging faster and wider. In a soft whisper, the man holding the rope sings:

It's the eye of the tiger.

It's the thrill of the fight.

Rising up to the challenge of our rival.

And the last known survivor

Stalks his prey in the night.

And he's watching us all with the eye of the tiger

The eye of the tiger

The eye of the tiger

The eye of the tiger

The eye of the tiger

“We should have let him go commando,” he tells the woman with a wry grin, as he finally steadies the rope.

The upper torso of the man at the receiving end of the rope is covered with a thick blanket stapled in place to ensure it does not slip off. He does not have any trousers on. Just a pair of boxers, which are now soaked in urine.

“I don’t care about his pants. But the helmet and the blanket will work,” she says.

“How fucked up was your commando school? It takes someone really wicked to make a man about to be eaten by a tiger wear a helmet and a blanket,” says the fat man.

“The helmet and the blanket will delay the tigress’ assault on his vital organs. It’ll defer his death and prolong agony.”

“He will literally see the tigress eat him alive then?”

“That’s the plan, my man,” she says.

That’s when they hear the tigress’ first roar, before she breaks out of the bushes a short distance to their right.

The woman trains the flashlight on the moving mass of saffron, black and white.

“Now,” the man wearing the hikers’ shirt whispers.

The commando cuts the rope tied to the ledge. The man falls to the ground with a thud. The tiger is alarmed for a moment and stops in its tracks, like a majestic statue caught in the flashlight’s beam against an untamed garden of uneven brush and unruly shrubs. The beast moves cautiously to reassess the situation.

The last living specimen of the jungle’s apex species stares at her unusual looking, wriggling prey for a few seconds.

She lunges, going for the neck first, but the helmet impedes her bite. Shifting her focus, she aims for the midriff and ends up chewing the old, stale blanket. It's only at that moment that she notices his bare legs.

For the trio up in the machan, every second of the carnage playing out below seems to take an age. The two men cover their ears with their palms to block the manic screams of the prey, who is being mauled, torn and eaten. They lie slumped on the machan’s rough floor, with the only woman in the group trying to calm them by stroking their backs reassuringly.

The screams stop in seconds, followed by the sounds of the tigress making its way through muscle, bone and organs.

It has been an hour since the tiger’s kill. The fat man has passed out. The man in the hikers’ jacket still has his eyes clenched shut. Tears stain his cheeks.

Only the former commando seems alive to the situation. She gently pushes them away and stands up to scan the ground below. The tigress has dragged her kill to the edge of the clearing before dining on it. What remains is the mangled helmet and the tattered blanket. One foot, from the knee down, seems to have been flung a few feet away, while the other foot, badly chewed from the thigh down, lies on the bloodstained grass.

“Guys, it’s over. Get up.”

“Is the tigress gone?” asks the fat man. As he tries to get up, his hand knocks the plastic cap of a dessert cup off the machan’s edge.

“Job done?” asks the man in the hiker’s jacket, as he composes himself. He takes the monocular from her hands.

“Done and how. But it’s funny, how she only chewed the exposed legs, but finished the rest of him,” the commando says.

"The head... the head..." the man in the hiker's jacket exclaims, adjusting the brightness levels of the device's infrared filter. “His head’s still in the helmet.” He covers his mouth to avoid the urge to puke.

She snatches the monocular from his hands and hands him a vial of eucalyptus oil.

“You are right,” she says. “Dab your nostrils with that oil, you’ll feel better.”

“You want to see what went down?” She hands the monocular to the fat man, who refuses to take it.

“Ok… So his head is detached, but my head’s still spinning from his screams… Shall we head back?”

They start climbing down the rope ladder.

“Is it a coincidence that you mentioned the word ‘head’ three times?” jokes the man in the hiker’s jacket as he follows the commando down the ladder.

The fat man ignores him.

“You’ve picked up all that dessert debris, right?” she asks, as she gathers the length of rope, that has fallen to the ground. She has neatly folded the ladder and now coils both lengths of the rope.

“Yes. Yes. All evidence wound up”.

She loops the bloody rope in a coil as she leads the way through a path opposite the end, where the grass is stained with blood.

It’s a cold dawn. Moist seeds and shredded wild vegetation line their shoes and trousers as they make their way to the dew-laced grass, patches of which now bear traces of the blood.

The sky is just breaking into light.

The man in the hiker’s jacket looks at the scene of carnage and spits out in disgust before lighting up a cigarette. The flame warms his cupped palms, as he hums.

“Bidi jalaile jigar se piya….”

By the time they reach their 4x4, the fireball breaks through the horizon. For the trio, a new day has dawned.