Born To Connect The Dots

Nine days after that difficult delivery under the rock, Theria knew she had given birth to a weirdo. The cubs had just opened their eyes. Three perfect little creatures, hungry as hell. As Theria licked them one by one, she saw the tiniest one, Pardus, looking at her with an intensity, which at first, slightly alarmed her.

On reassuring herself she was 91 kgs and 6.2 feet long while this puny thing was 500 grams and 30 inches, she calmed down and offered him a teat. She never forgot that look though and it was something she would get to know intimately. Those strange, staring, unblinking eyes would follow her for the next fifteen years as if they were finding the secrets of the universe in her anatomy.

Pardus didn’t know the cause of his compulsion. As soon as he opened his eyes, he had spotted Mama’s rosettes (spots for the scientifically challenged) and a tiny part of his brain began connecting one rosette to another to make imaginary shapes. In the beginning he made simple things, teats, tiny rodents, dung beetles, a paw with an unsheathed claw. He could see his world reflected on his Mama’s skin.

He had tried looking at the flower-like patterns of his brother and sister but nothing happened. It was only his Mama’s spots that compelled him to connect the dots. As he got to know the world more he began making all kinds of shapes with her rosettes . A plane flying through a multi-spiralled cloud, an eland’s digestive tract clawed out, the sharp canines of a baboon framed by a roaring, powerful jaw. Every day, he would make as many shapes as he could, compulsively, obsessively, passionately.

Nobody realised this inner workings of his mind and neither did he communicate what was going on in a few well articulated barks. To the rest of the animal kingdom (including blood relatives), he looked like an idiot who seemed to be staring at his Mama’s skin all the time, with a slightly daft look, as if he was half in this world and half in another.

In the beginning Mama tried giving him a whack with her paw telling him staring was bad manners but no matter what she did or how much she growled, he would keep looking intensely at her. Soon she got used to it and began ignoring him. His gaze become one of the things in her natural world, like the dream murmurs of monkeys or the smell of an unwashed bat flying at night.

After fifteen years of being looked at, one day, Mama keeled over and died. Pardus waited for the hyenas to come and eat her insides. Soon, all that was left of Mama was her skin and a few bones glistening in their emptiness.

Pardus dragged Mama’s coat up a tree and hung it on a twig. Then he sprawled on a branch just above, looked down at Mama’s rosettes gently swinging to and fro in the wind and started making more and more fantastical shapes in his head.

Moral: Everything doesn’t need an explanation



Theria and Pardus are drawn by the fabulous Bijoy Venugopal. You can find more of his wonderful stuff here bijoyvenugopal.com