India, Dec. 29 -- You call me brother. Bibtya Bhau. But like all brothers, we seem to be in a property dispute. Recently, in Bhayandar, one of mine injured seven of yours. The claws and teeth did what they were made to do. One of your newspaper headlines said "Bhayandar wakes to terror". I assure you, the terror ran both ways. Did you not see him? Stuck in an apartment block. Cornered. Cowering in a stairwell while you made quick videos of him. He was afraid, which made him angry; he was scared, which made him snarl. The only thing he knew was to lash out. But we have known each other for a long time. We share this city between us. Fear and anger should not be the only ways we see each other. Because the first thing you should know (and some of you do know) is that I have always been open to negotiation. If a two-million-year-old species - yes, that's how old we are - learns to cross car-laden highways (your Ghodbunder Road) and long-spun train-tracks (your Diva-Vasai line), then you cannot call me close-minded. We are both very urban. Mumbai is as much mine as yours. We both have stakes here. We need to figure out this thing called co-existence. As I said, some of you already know it. The adivasis, among them the Warlis and the Malhar Kolis, who have shared my forests and their edges as their homes and hearths, know it. For them, I am Waghoba, leopard deity. One of my sons from among them, Prakash Bhoir, sang: "Wagh deva jungle vachava ya tu dhav re" ("O Leopard God, come save the forest"). He told me "udvasta zale jeevan, pakshanchi tutali gharti, geli amchi sheti, haravli naati goti, hi naati vachava yela tu dhav re wagh deva" ("life has been devastated, the birds' nests have been destroyed, our fields are gone, our relationships, lost. Come, O Leopard God, save these relationships.") To them, I am guardian and companion, friend and father, a headstrong and generous brother. They know that the day is theirs, the night is mine. I am matter-of-fact for them. They pray to me the same as they skirt my path. Some nights, when Prakash wakes up to the sound of my paws on his roof in his house in Keltipada, he knows I look out for his people. You can't call someone a god and not expect him to preserve your world. I do my best. Most nights, I only target the poultry. But several of you don't know the rules of coexistence. You're new here. You need to learn from the adivasis. For you, I am only a key ring or a wallpaper. You've seen me only in zoos and reels. You've heard stories of my poaching. You've looked at my pictures in your children's drawing books. Crossing the Sanjay Gandhi National Park main gate in Borivali, you've passed my sculpture where I look like I'm materialising out of a wall. You've feared encountering me on treks. You've sheltered your pet dogs from me, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. You seem to be less concerned about your strays who crowd around the many little dumpyards on the fringes of our city forest. Perhaps, in your heart of hearts, you know I need to eat to live and will go anywhere I find it. It's just that you don't want to be that food yourself. I get that. But I'm sure you won't go out of your way to wish me ill either. You won't want me to be run over by your trains, as happened to one of us recently who tried crossing it near Kaman. You don't really wish this, right? You must know that your new settlements didn't simply overlap with mine; they interrupted it. In the past, when I heard that you wanted some of us trapped and relocated away from our home ranges, I didn't know what to say. Being driven out of one's home, who'd want that for anybody? We are, as the Swadesi boys sang a few years ago, children of a common soil, children of a common mother. We may not understand each other fully, but you and I are city siblings; and like all siblings, we need to learn to share a room. The real question, then, for you is: how do you want to live? By respecting us or by conquering us? By being good neighbours or by building over our backyards. Sometimes, I think if you only knew how proximate I am to you, and how much our paths cross daily, you'd understand the need to coexist. Sometimes, when you pass late at night on the Chinchoti-Bhiwandi road, you don't notice me lurking in the roadside foliage. You go on living in the same city as me, within my range, within the perimeter of my daily travels, not batting an eye. We need to find a way to live together that is fair to both of us. Because, often, what you call progress is the depletion of my home. What you often see as the right way for a city to grow axes my world. No species survives on its own, alone. That is not a life possible, or worthy. As it has come to be, this is a city bequeathed to both of us. We must find a way to see this home as 'ours', not just yours or mine, and make it capable of a full life for both....