It was back in 2013 that Nitin Sekar, now World Wildlife Fund (WWF) India’s head of elephant conservation, came up with an idea that would become the newly released book, What’s Left of the Jungle: A Conservation Story. Having been in the works for close to nine years, the project pivoted from just a retelling of Sekar’s own experience as a young field researcher in West Bengal’s Buxa Tiger Reserve, studying the role of elephants in seed dispersal, to the story of Akshu Atri, a local villager who lives in Madhubangaon, deep within Buxa, and who becomes Sekar’s field assistant and closest friend.

“I realised that the best way to capture the complexity of conservation was through a parallel telling of Akshu’s own story. As the book matured, I replaced almost all of my own animal and poacher encounter stories with Akshu’s ordeals,” Sekar tells mid-day.