I wish I could turn back the clock and bring the wheels of time to a stop. That is what I felt when I looked at grandfather lying on the bed, suffering from high fever and grandmother hovering anxiously around him. Surely it was not that long ago that he was sitting with all of us cousins in his house in Siliguri, telling us tales of his adventures in the jungles as a young forest officer. How many years? Only ten years, I realized. But while I, as a twenty-year old was now discovering the world around me, he had turned eighty-two, and had increasingly become frail and home-bound. That afternoon in Siliguri, when all four of us had gone to visit our grandparents in the winter holidays, was etched in my memory and will never fade. I was just a young girl of ten at the time……….
The Spell of the Jungle
