A jumbo truth

A scribe describes the story behind the show Poacher

It all began in May 2015, when an emaciated man walked into a forest office in Kerala and confessed to a crime. He was part of a gang of ivory poachers with links to middlemen of an international ivory trading racket.

Kunjumon became Aruku in Emmy-winning filmmaker Richie Mehta's hard-hitting show Poacher, which released on Amazon Prime Video on February 23, and has Alia Bhatt as executive producer. Mehta, however, has remained true to the story and as a result, the show is receiving rave reviews.

The suicide of a prime accused at a pineapple plantation, a race against time, inter-departmental squabbles, the country's largest ivory raid at a secret location in Delhi—these are all fiction rooted in fact, says Jayan Menon, the reporter who exposed the racket on the front page of the Malayala Manorama on June 29, 2015. Menon sketched out how 20 wild elephants were killed by poachers in the forests of Kerala. Here, he tells THE WEEK what really transpired, and how, sometimes, the truth really is more gripping than its own dramatisation.