Firmly clasping his six-year-old daughter Keerthi by her elbow, Chennai-based Kumaran Avudaiyappan, 40, walks barefoot. Cautiously, he and his family take the 2,000 steps leading to Tirumala, translated to ‘holy hills’ in Tamil, in Andhra Pradesh’s Tirupati district. Here, devotees believe Venkateswara, a Vishnu avatar, lives. The devotional ‘Govinda Hari Govinda... Venkataramana Govinda...’ blares over the audio system installed throughout the 10.5 km-long trekking route, meant to inspire the pilgrims’ progress.
This is a route Avudaiyappan has done every year for the past 30 years or more. He and Keerthi are two among the 25,000 pilgrims who walk up daily. Along the slow path that can take up to 5 hours to climb with a child—in his youth, he could do it in 3 hours—there are always people, sometimes 30 to 40, sometimes up to 100 at peak ‘traffic’ time during the day, but as the evening wears on, the crowd peters out. Avudaiyappan’s eyes dart about despite it being the afternoon, watching the forest that surrounds the steps to what believers feel is close to heaven.
A week ago, a leopard had killed Lakshita, a six-year-old child near the 7th mile point (at about 11 km by road) on the ghat road that runs parallel to the old trekking route that starts at Alipiri. This was the first-ever fatal attack on the hill. The girl, from Nellore district’s Pothireddypalem village, was walking ahead of her relatives—five adults and four other children—at about 7:30 p.m. When she felt hungry, they told her to go ahead to a shop to get some biscuits, but when they reached there, she was nowhere to be found. They asked the security team for help, but no one could find her. The next day, her mauled body was found in the forest.
