Extraordinary stories often have the most ordinary beginnings, and this one starts early one evening near a village called Khandar when Amarsingh Gurjar, a subsistence farmer with a carefully crafted moustache, made a bed beside his wheat field. He’d slept there ever since he ploughed the land because sambar deer, nilgai and wild boar are a menace out here in rural Rajasthan, and could ruin his gehu crop overnight.

 

The nights are uncomfortably cold in December so Amarsingh wrapped a blanket high around his shoulders, and before climbing into bed he walked a few hundred metres to check on a camera trap he’d set up that afternoon. It was working fine so he patrolled with a torch as he retraced his steps and at around 9.30pm, satisfied his crops were safe for the time being, Amarsingh lay down and pulled the heavy blanket over his body. The camera trap might have been part of Amarsingh’s moonlighting job as a tiger tracker, but he wasn’t at all worried about sleeping under the Indian skies; he had always been safe.

 

Now this might not seem “ordinary” to you or me – because how could anything in India’s striking desert state ever be mundane – but to Amarsingh it was just another day in the fields. However, this is where “ordinary” ends, and for the rest of Amarsingh’s story to make any sense you need to sit beside me on a crumbling wall of 1200-year-old Ranthambhore Fort; I’d like to show you a few things.

 

It’s so beautifully peaceful up here; a perfect Rajasthan afternoon wrapped in that earthy smell of hot stones cooling late in the day. There’s a very soft breeze shaking the leaves of the forest below us – or perhaps it’s a troop of langur monkeys. See that dark green patch in the canopy? It’s a Ficus religiosa, the Bodhi tree or sacred fig, so named because it was under one of these megalithic trees that Buddha reached enlightenment. Out there on the Aravalli hills, most of the trees are “dhok” (Anogeissus pendula), from the same family as African birch, and their leaves are a favourite with nilgai and the deer of the park. Look past the wild peacock on that wall; can you see those green birds above the fort’s ramparts? They’re parakeets, flying with a freedom so many of their species will never know.

 

Amarsingh lives over those hills to the north, where the Banas River forms a boundary of Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve; we’re on the southern side, near the gates of India’s most popular tiger-safari destination. What makes Ranthambhore so popular is not only that it falls just outside India’s “Golden Triangle” of Deli (340km away), Agra (250km away) and Jaipur (180km  away) – it’s also home to more than 60 tigers, some of who are seen almost daily by tourists. That’s why I’ve brought you here: because Amarsingh’s extraordinary story is a tale about stripes.

 

Ranthambhore gets its name from two adjacent hills: Rann and Thambhore, on which “our” fort stands. This four-square-kilometre fortress was built sometime between the fifth and tenth centuries and since then it has been a settlement, fort and prison. These days people climb the ancient stone steps to visit old Hindu temples, but I come here because the further you wander, the more interesting the ruins become… and views across southern Ranthambhore are spectacular.

 

Those golden-grassed hills below us are the empire of the Lady of the Lakes; a 19-year-old tigress whose given name, Machali, means “fish” in Hindi. Those lakes, fringed with tall grasses that turn electric copper in the late afternoon, hold enormous marsh crocodiles and yet elegant spotted deer still wade gracefully through the shallow water. It looks peaceful now but dramatic battles have been fought down there: water flying, limbs flailing, cameras clicking wildly and, more often than not, Machali victorious.

 

Until the early 20th century the forests of Ranthambhore were the exclusive hunting grounds of the Jaipur royal family; grazing and felling of trees was forbidden, but as India’s population grew, pressure on the forests increased.  In 1955 the forests were declared the Sawai Madhopur Sanctuary (Sawai Madhopur is a town a few kilometres from where we’re sitting), but legal hunting continued for another 18 years until Ranthambhore’s tiger population was almost annihilated. Something needed to be done, and so when the Indian government and WWF initiated Project Tiger in 1973, this sanctuary became one of the first under the scheme’s protection; in 1980 part of it was declared a national park.

 

Over the next decade the park’s tiger population increased and Ranthambhore became known as the best place in the world to see tigers; in the early Nineties and again in 2003, however, numbers plummeted when poachers fed a growing demand for tiger skins. The population has since flourished and now there are more than 60 tigers in the park. Some say it’s Machali who’s responsible for the park’s success: while she’s raised nine cubs here, the Lady of the Lakes has been highly visible to tourists and she’s become the most photographed wild tiger in the world. According to pressure group TOFTigers, she alone is responsible for earning US$100-million for Indian tourism since she became the dominant female in 1998.  Fantastic sightings and photographs attract more tourists, and more tourists often mean better protection for wildlife.

 

Yesterday I saw Machali’s grandson, Arrowhead, right there where that vehicle is parked on the edge of Lotus Lake (there are no lotuses, however; during the 2003/4 drought wild boar ate all the roots). We’d heard alarm calls of spotted deer so our guide turned off the engine and we waited and watched. By the time Arrowhead sauntered out from the grass, five packed park vehicles with protruding selfie sticks were capturing his every move. Ranthambhore is divided into zones and vehicles may not cross from one into another; we followed him to the zone boundary, his head hung low and enormous feet leaving deep pug marks in the dry earth.

 

Ranthambhore might be gazetted as 1334 square kilometres but tigers, of course, have very little regard for human boundaries. There are regular reports of bagh spoor (and attacks on livestock) in farmlands around the park, but in 2003 when a tiger called Broken Tail was killed by a train 180 kilometres from the reserve, experts considered it abnormal that he’d roamed so far. They were wrong – and they know that now because of data captured by Amarsingh and the other farmers who work part-time for Tiger Watch.

 

Amarsingh is one of 20 Village Wildlife Volunteers (VWV) who have been trained to use camera traps and GPSs, and given cellphones to transfer data to the Tiger Watch headquarters in Sawai Madhopur (Tiger Watch was set up by the Forest Department of Rajasthan to work with the information gathered by the VWVs). Since late 2014 the VWVs have recorded and tracked the movements of the cats, and the data they’ve collected is giving conservationists insight into what tigers need to survive: a network of protected areas through which they can safely roam.

 

The VWVs have evolved into valuable go-betweens for park authorities and villagers by managing and minimising the man-animal conflict that threatens the future of India’s wildlife, and in just 18 months they’ve become the humble protectors of Ranthambhore’s tigers.

 

So that’s how Amarsingh ended up tending camera traps as well as his wheat crop, and after a good night’s sleep beside his field that night last December, Amarsingh woke up at dawn and happened to look over the edge of his bed. All at once, he felt scared, amused, elated and relieved: there, a few centimetres from his face, was the bold pug mark of a tigress. He saw another, and another, so he followed them: the spoor led Amarsingh straight to the camera trap he’d checked before going to bed. At 11.36pm, the camera showed, a mature tigress had casually sauntered past the lens.

 

Tiger to soongh ke gaya – the tiger sniffed me and left, said Amarsingh, twirling his moustache. “She gave me a message: you are my saviour and I will not hurt you.”

 

From subsistence farmer to champion of tigers: in India, you see, life is anything but ordinary.