I have goose bumps on my skin as I peer out the window of my sleeper coach. But it isn’t the cold. It’s the sight of a large hoarding which says ‘Welcome to Gir, the last home of the Asiatic Lion’. I’m here at last. Like every other person in India, I’ve learnt about lions living in Gir since school days. It was their last refuge, I’d been told.

The word ‘refuge’ painted images of lions fighting tooth and nail to hold the borders of their shrinking territory.  Lions holding out against the pressing enemy, literally like refugees. I could never picture the enemy though. Who or what was the enemy? The tiger? The expanding human population?

I crunched into my last cream cracker and took a sip of water to soften it in my mouth. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been caught dead eating something as tasteless as this. But the biscuits were given to me by a friend and moreover I’d been starving for several hours. Right now they were a lifesaver!

To get to Gir from Goa, I had undertaken an 18 hour train journey, followed by another 12 hour bus journey. Friends from Baroda had helped me book a cheap room at a  ‘Hotel Umang’. Umang, together with a few shops and eateries, were part of a characterless street right outside the sanctuary. But that was OK. I was here to see lions, not appreciate culture and architecture.

As usual, I’m travelling alone, so I need to see if I can find some people to share the cost of the jeep safari with me. Travelling in a group has its merits. You split room rates, share safaris, share taxies. But all my friends are too busy meeting deadlines or making babies.

On the first evening I walk to the safari reception centre and hang around. I make some polite conversation with a few tourists and put the word around with the guides that I’m a ‘sharer’. No luck. But if I put myself in their shoes I would not surprised. If I was with my newly wed wife and in-laws, I wouldn’t be thinking of saving a measly 300 rupees, especially if that meant sharing the jeep with some rakish looking guy in a sleeveless vest!

I tell myself that I’ll try again tomorrow. If not, I’ll pay the entire 1500 rupees and do a jeep ride in style. For now I decide  I’ll take a Kutchee and head to Devalia, the Gir interpretation centre. The Kutchee is a basically a diesel Royal Enfield with a cart in place of its rear wheel. In the mornings it is used to transport milk and gas cylinders.

Right now it’s transporting me. The sound of the diesel engine is awesome and I’m enjoying the ride. But by the time I’m back I’m going to need a knee and hip replacement. Yes, the Kutchee doesn’t seem to have heard of shock absorbers! On the way, my driver pulls over at a bridge to show me a crocodile basking in the distance. I’ve also spotted some black ibis. They look gorgeous with their scarlet heads.

At Deonar I buy a ticket and get into a bus full of twenty people. The bus safari is organized by the forest department and there’s one leaving every hour or so. It’s a nice and cheap option for people who can’t afford the regular jeep safari. Besides they are going to take us to a place where we a lion sighting is almost guaranteed.

How? Well, they’re taking us through a ten square kilometre patch of fenced off forest. In this bonsai sanctuary are about ten lions. Most are trouble makers. The ones that got out of the main sanctuary and attacked livestock in the villages nearby. They’ll be holidaying here for around six months before being relocated back into the original sanctuary. To make them feel at home they’ve also got a whole bunch of Axis deer along with a few of their other prey.

We enter the sanctuary through large intimidating double gates. They make you feel like you’re about to meet some of the most deadly convicts on the planet! In about twenty minutes we’ve found our lions. There’s three of them. A sudden hushed silence comes over the bus. Everyone plasters to one side of the bus. There’s a lot of neck craning going on. Most people are also filming or photographing the lions with their cameras and mobile phones.I shove my camera in between the throng of heads and click some shots.

The lions seem least bothered with all the fuss and are simply lazing in the shade of a zizipus tree. All three are males. And all are impressively built. Two of them, judging by their sparse manes, seem to be sub-adults. They are licking each other. One of them then turns and shoves his rump in the other’s face as though to say ‘go on, give me a pat my friend, give me a pat.’

But the only patting that is done is by a lady sitting behind me. She’s thumping the side of the bus to get the lions attention. I’m thinking that if it does work maybe the lion will charge towards her. In the bargain I might get a few shots of the lion slapping her silly for disturbing them. No such luck. I remind myself that this could only happen in a Daffy Duck cartoon.

The next morning I’m up at 4:30. I walk in the dark to the safari reception centre and manage to strike up a deal with a middle-aged Bengali couple. They have a son who is also called Rahul. The safari is now going to cost them about 400 rupees less. But they aren’t satisfied and they still go scouting around to find more loners like me. Bring the cost down still further. My kinda people!

Eventually we are still four of us and we’ve been allotted route 4 and route 7. A handsome young guide with a husky voice like Bryan Adams’ accompanies us.  The forest is still dark at 5.30. I’m excited. I’ve finally made it into Gir! We drive around for a bit and the guide points out spotted deer, a large owl, a ghost tree and a mud turtle that scurries into a stream as we near it. Eventually we reach a huge lake. Our four wheel drive handles one edge of the lake confidently.  When we get across we are treated to a beautiful sunrise. But still no sign of any lions. My Bengali companions are getting anxious.

They keep coaxing and cajoling the guide as though he holds the key to the secret place where a bunch of lions are stashed away, ‘You must be knowing where the lions are, come on, bhaiyya, please shows us some lions. We’ve come all the way from Bengal to see the lions.’.

I mention Devalia and the fenced off lions. But the Bengalis are not interested. They want to do a jeep safari and they want to be guaranteed a lion sighting. Truly tough people to please. The guide is patient and he sympathizes with them, even laughing at the jokes they throw at him. If I were him I would have gone out of my way to find my lions just so I could feed the Bengalis to them! We don’t see lions that morning. I’m not disappointed, though. I wanted to see the Gir Forest and I’ve seen it. The Bengali lady, however, is close to tears as she comforts me and tells me ‘in the end it is your luck, no?’

In the late morning, I’m at one of the eateries snacking on a paratha. There’s no non-vegetarian food served here. I can’t believe it. Inside the sanctuary lions are feasting on prime game meat and here I can’t even get myself an egg! Joining me is Hanif. He’s a forest guard and he’s the one responsible for getting me the cheap accommodation. In the evening he’ll be responsible for me sharing another trip with one of his contacts. Hanif is a well built chap with an amiable smile. He’s surprisingly helpful and he goes out of his way to make sure I’m having a good time. He even says he’ll look into getting some eggs for me.

In the evening I’m back on the safari. This time we’ve got a smallish perky guide with a big smile studded with a two gold teeth. A lot of them have this ghetto gangster gold-toothed smile, and I’m beginning to think that in a world of volatile stock markets it might actually be a sensible investment.

The guide rattles off a few facts about Gir at the  start of the journey. The sanctuary is 1,412 square kilometres in size, and about 40,000 chital live here. In addition, the sanctuary is home to Nilgai, Sambar, wild boar and Chinkara. Also living in the sanctuary for a very long time are the Maldharis (a tribe that herds cattle in the jungle).

The continued survival of the Asiatic lions in the Gir forest is one of the most well known wildlife protection success stories of our planet. At the turn of this century the Nawab of Junagadh invited the viceroy of India Lord Curzon to join him on a lion hunt. As luck would have it, on that very day, Lord Curzon had received a message alerting him to the fact that the Asiatic lion was on the verge of extinction. Apparently, only about 12 individuals survived. He therefore urged the Nawab to protect this species, and from this originally feeble number of 12 the lion population would steadily climb until it reached 411 at the last census! The African lion numbers between 20,000 to 50,000.

Inbreeding is a serious concern for the Asiatic lion. Considering they’ve built up from a number of 12 they genetic diversity in their gene pool is almost zilch. Put simply, the Asiatic lions are not a long shot from being clones of each other. A single disease could still wipe out the entire population. What about genetic diseases? Well so far they seem to be doing fine. One of the reasons might be that the Asiatic lion has been chronically inbred which has its own advantages unlike acute inbreeding. Chronic inbreeding is a very effective evolutionary tool for cleaning out deleterious genes from the gene pool.

Apparently, the Asiatic lion can mate with the African lion. They differ at the level of the subspecies though. David Quammen in his book, ‘Monster of God’ mentions that laboratory measurements of genetic divergence suggest a divergence as much as 200,000 years back. The Gir interpretation centre suggests a much more conservative figure at 6000 B.C.

So, what’s the real difference between the Asiatic and the African lions? Wikipedia mentions that ‘the Asiatic lions have less swollen tympanic bullae, shorter postorbital constriction, and usually have divided infraorbital foramen’. Yeah, jargon to me, too!

But there more tangible differences between the two too. For one thing, the Asiatic male lions have a sparser mane that almost never covers the ears. In addition, both sexes of the Asians have a thick fold of skin running along their bellies. The Asians live in a much smaller pride (possibly due to the smaller size of their prey) and are almost purely predatory. African lions can afford to be scavengers and waltz in on someone else’s kill. But if you’re a lion in Gir then you’d better learn how to kill!

And that’s exactly what we found, a lion with a kill! Right next to the entrance of route 6. Actually, it was a lioness who’d make the kill, and the prey was a cow that had strayed away from a Maldhari’s herd. The kill was only about 30 meters from the jeep track so we could still catch a glimpse of the lioness’ head over the tan-coloured body of the cow. I clicked a few shots but the lighting was lousy and when I check them later they were no good.

As we drove away, I asked the guide what would happen to the Maldhari who owned the cow. He said that the government would compensate him as this was a fairly regular feature in Gir. The Maldharis are a tough people and should a lion attack one of their cows or buffaloes they will fend off the big cat using just a short wooden stick.

I also want to know if there are any conflicts between leopards and lions. I know that tigers kill leopards when they get a chance. I am told that for the most part, lions  don’t, although it isn’t unheard of to find a leopard calmly sitting with a kill up in a tree while the lioness he’s stolen it from prances fuming down below. A few days later when I’m travelling back home by bus the sneakiness of the leopard will be brought up again. A chatty guy sitting next to me will tell me ‘Lion—he is very nice. Not doing anything. But Leopard….BASTARD he is!’

The Gir jungle is a dry jungle, and even though I had arrived just after the monsoons it was not half as green as the jungles of Goa and Karnataka. Even with the handicap of a botanically untrained eye, I recognized teak trees and several zizipus species. I also noticed the exotic and invasive lantana plants with their pretty yellow and red flowers. For the most part, I was happy with the forest. Happy, but not in awe of it as I was of the Kanha forest in Madhya Pradesh. I couldn’t help wishing that the Asiatic lion had chosen Kanha as their last hold-out instead of this scrubby forest. Kanha would have been a truly fitting place for this king of the jungle.

But enough of my whims and fancies. I would learn later on that the Madhya Pradesh government had actually offered to relocate some of the Gujarat Lions into the MP forests. This to me sounded like a sound idea. After all, the lions in Gir are in so much of a surplus that they are literally pouring out of Gir. Why not introduce some into MP? This would give the extras a much better chance of survival, in addition to achieving the effect of spreading the proverbial eggs into different baskets.

The Gujarat government wasn’t going to fall for this, though. After all, they are the sole owners of  ‘the last home of the Asiatic lion’. Two homes could cut the profits in half. You can almost hear the Gujaratis as they smile smugly at the MP government, saying ‘Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll handle our lions by ourselves!’

Two hours after we had seen the lioness at the kill we were upon our second and last sighting for the day. Three lionesses were lying on their bellies, right besides the jeep track. I had been comfortably day dreaming now for the last several dozen minutes but being alerted to the lions I snapped right out of it as if someone had just chucked a bucket of cold water over me.

‘Lions, Rahul…LIONS right in front of you’ I shouted inside my head. The jeep stopped less than four metres away from them. One of the lionesses stood up, stretched, and then walked into the jungle. She was soon followed by another who also stood up but dug her dinner plate sized paws into the earth before sitting down to contact her belly with the ground. When she got up for the second time, she purred, stretched and walked away. The third lioness now flipped over onto her back with all four paws in the air as she wriggled from side to side. Just like my Rottweiler, Diesel does back home!

She was visibly enjoying her back rub. I switched between naked eyes, camera viewfinder and my binoculars as I greedily lapped up every sight of her. I couldn’t help notice how much in contact with the earth both she and the other two lionesses had been. As humans we wage a constant battle against dirt, dusting it away, sweeping our houses and wearing shoes. And yet here were three big cats who somehow seemed to benefit immensely from marinating themselves in it! As our jeep moved away I was still hogging the sight of the lioness.

The next morning, I’m waiting for my bus back to Baroda. Hanif sits with me. He’s shaken my hand for the 12^th time this morning and for the 47^th time since I’ve first met him. ‘I told you Rahul to take route 6 na. And now you’ve seen so many lions. And then tell me are you happy now?’

‘Yes Hanif,  I’m very happy’ I tell him. I’m thinking that if this continues I might just have to get a tattoo on my arm that says the same. Hanif wants me to come back in the dry season when the lions match the colour of the dry landscape. It’s an amazing time to find lions he tells me.

As I board my bus I think about the 36-hour long journey back home. The money spent on the trip. The protein devoid diet for the last one week.  I weigh them mentally against the 7 minutes in total that I saw the lions. Was it worth it? Totally. ‘Yes Hanif’,  I say to myself, ‘I’m very happy’.