What we have on our plate is frugal — rice, dal and potato curry, which to compound matters, is crushingly, breathsappingly hot. This is the boatman’s staple dinner, explains Mursheed, “for rice and potato is easiest to procure and cook”. What he puts in his mouth is the least of Mursheed's worries when he goes out fishing for days into the deep recesses of Amitav Ghosh’s ‘tide country’, Sundarbans. When his countryboat is anchored for the night, inside one of the creeks that crisscross the forest land like veins, Mursheed has a bigger worry: tigers.

Tonight — precariously dark four days after Diwali — is one such night when Mursheed is on the lookout. Gentle waves lap at the sides of our boat, together with a comforting breeze they induce sways; sleep can be easy if not for Mursheed, and the threat he continuously holds out.

“He is patient,” the boatman talks almost reverentially about the man-eaters among tigers. “Sometimes he keeps track of human activity for hours, follows every movement and when he senses the moment, jumps in a flash. He comes from behind, puts the full force of his 200 kilos behind the leap and goes for the neck.” A lantern throws light only till a few metres beyond a boat: beyond, there’s darkness. Nothing. Or maybe something: a pair of lurking eyes watching from within the thick mangroves that surround us, biding time… I take refuge in numbers.

There are eight of us on the boat tonight and Mursheed says a tiger never attacks a group. “He’s as scared of humans as we are of him.” Before we started on our two-day boat journey into the bowels of Sundarbans, at Mursheed’s home in Moiput village, the man had surreptitiously laid out on a table some of his treasures: tiger nails, teeth and a portion of the neckline. As a fisher, he barely earns a thousand rupees every month, the proposed buyer of the tiger ware has promised him

... contd.