A Tiger is Watching Us
Al-Risala (English), April 1991, p. 20
By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan is named as the default author of the periodical; a piece that carries another writer’s byline is credited to that writer.
A Tiger is Watching Us
1991 4 April 20 A Tiger is Watching Us (244) Jim Corbett, the Englishman who is now famous for his book Man-Eaters of Kumaon, first came to India in 1907. When he learnt that there were many man-eating tigers in the jungles of Kumaon, he decided to go there and to take along his rifle. In 1907, he shot dead his first man-eater, one which had killed and eaten 430 human beings.
Jim Corbett spent 22 years in the jungles of Kumaon, and risked his life to kill more than a dozen man-eaters. The only rewarding aspect of this hazardous adventure was, as he put it, “the satisfaction at having made a small portion of the earth safe for a girl to walk on.”
Giving details of his experiences of confrontations with tigers in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, he writes, “The near proximity of a tiger in daylight, even when it has not seen you, causes a disturbance in the bloodstream. When the tiger is not an ordinary one, however, but a man-eater, and the time is ten o’clock on a dark night, and you know the man-eater is watching you, the disturbance in the blood becomes a storm,”
If the feeling that a tiger is near, and is watching one, causes a disturbance in the bloodstream, what will happen when one realizes that God, who is the creator of all tigers and of the heavens and the earth is near one, and is watching one, and that nothing can be hidden from His view?
