My Husband & Other Animals

by Janaki Lenin

Once when I was frying garlic, there arose a strong stench of ... no, it couldn’t be ... tree frog piss! It had taken me a million years to just peel a few garlic cloves, and I wasn’t about to spend my remaining life peeling more. So I added extra spices to mask the odour. I can’t be sure if the compliments that followed were the result of my expert cooking or that undercurrent of, shall we say, the chef’s secret ingredient.

I suspected he was thrilled to have a leopard living close by. He had said repeatedly he’d love to live amongst sabre-toothed cats, and the mere thought would send a shiver of excitement through him.

Having a predator who called our garden ‘home’ was enough to send adrenalin rushing to all our senses. I imagine, from being like sluggish domestic water buffalos, we were sparked by the wild ourselves.

Leopard researcher, Vidya Athreya, confirmed that these cats living off stray dogs and goats were indeed fat, as they didn’t have to work too hard for their prey. She also cautioned that male leopards do not stick around if there are no females.

When he was nine, living in Bombay, he and his pals filled potholes on a main road leading to an expat community on Juhu Beach. Every family contributed eight annas (50 paise), and the scheme netted him about two or three rupees over a weekend. That was a lot of money in the 1950s.

Mrs Cromby offered four annas (25 paise) for every sparrow caught. After dark, Rom climbed up a stepladder and by blocking both sides of the gap, trapped the sparrows. In all, he recalls catching about nine sparrows and earning two rupees and four annas. In those days, no one ever thought that this plentiful bird would disappear, or that nearly 60 years hence that a World House Sparrow Day would be declared.

Adults these days were the kids of my time, and clearly, are made of quite different stuff.

I tried to imagine whether I could have earned pocket money as Rom had. No one in my family or neighbourhood would think of giving kids money in exchange for labour. Help was always

to be provided free, whether it was babysitting my brother or other kids in the neighbourhood, preparing vegetables for cooking, running errands, or cleaning up the house. It was my ‘duty’, I was told. If my parents had thrown in some money with ‘duty’, I would have done double the work with alacrity.

We learnt some new lessons in saltie behaviour from this episode. Salties can carry away prey underwater under certain circumstances. Perhaps this was the croc’s way of making a quick getaway, because Jito was harassing it. We also learnt not to be complacent in open beaches, especially when there was a population of crocs nearby. What’s 14 kms when the species is capable of navigating 2,000 kms in the open ocean?

James Zacharia, a Kerala Forest Department official who had also seen the pogeyan. James was climbing up a steep slope in Eravikulam National Park. Pausing to catch his breath, he had looked up to find himself staring straight into the eyes of Ole Smokey. The cat was lying on a rocky ledge looking down at him. Then quietly it vanished like only cats can do.

‘Why didn’t you get a picture?’ I demanded. ‘I was afraid that it might run away if I moved. So I just stood still, memorizing every feature of the pogeyan,’ he replied.

One evening I got a call from him and he said excitedly, ‘I found it! It’s the Asiatic golden

cat!’ My jaw dropped. The golden cat is found only in Southeast Asia and nowhere on peninsular India.

Trees provided the bridge for several troops of bonnet monkeys to go from forest to fields, but not without first tasting our produce. Palm squirrels used the trees as a launch pad for their guerilla warfare on the kitchen garden. Half-eaten green tomatoes, guavas and mangoes littered the ground, while tender, green, badly mauled chardonnay melons hung from vines. Presumably, the squirrels and monkeys decided to solve our problem of producing too much.

We are not the only ones singled out by monkeys. Across India, several villages are plagued by them.

At least we had the luxury of giving up farming since we made a living in other ways. Many farmers across India who rely on the produce of their land have no choice but to brave the monkeys’ raids.

Rom thought the trainers just intimidated the animals enough so they wouldn’t bite during the show. The accepted wisdom then was crocs can be tamed but not trained.

Ralf Sommerlad, the director of the Madras Crocodile Bank briefly in mid-2008, recalled seeing a man with his pet caiman, a kind of South American crocodile, in Frankfurt. When the man knelt down, the caiman would rub against his head and shoulders much like a puppy wanting to be petted.

Soon, a motley assortment of crocs of different species, such as Komodo and Thai – the Siamese crocs, Mick – the saltwater croc, and Abu – the Nile croc, were attending the Croc School.

Once when Ally was half way up the training ramp, Soham asked her to ‘jump’. As can be imagined, it is difficult to jump on an incline, but neither did she want to pass up the chance of earning a treat. So she raised herself on her toes and lay down flat on her stomach, miming a slow-motion jump without leaving the ground. Pretty amazing when you consider that Ally’s brain is about the size of a walnut.

Snakes, monitor lizards and turtles are on the waiting list, and apparently, in strict adherence to government regulations, there is no capitation fee for admission.

Meanwhile, the scared and frustrated bears went to work like a maelstrom, ripping, shitting, and chewing on every file in the room. Although I had heard this story several times, I never failed to laugh with glee. How often had I daydreamt of revenge on the obdurate bureaucracy!

Pietri writes his goal was to ‘put a Tibetan mastiff in every major American city’, which he almost accomplished. Most of these dogs found in the US today are apparently descendants of the early drug-runners.

He procured two sloth bear cubs, Dora and Flora, in whose crate he embedded 15 kgs of hashish and was caught red-handed. It appears to have been his only attempt at trading in wild animals.

Almost a decade later, these ants suddenly reared their ugly red heads by the tens of thousands.

At night, they marched in military order; if they were not scouting for sugar, nectar, anything sweet, they were looking for a place to nest.

Sleep was possible only under mosquito nets. In the middle of the night, lines of ants walked along the net stays and sides. We teased our guests, ‘Hope we don’t see you being carried away by ants!’ They smiled nervously in response. After a while the jokes got stale, and we could take it no longer. War!

we moved to our farm near Chengalpattu, and one night, a few years later, we stared in utter horror as hundreds of the distinctive Croc Bank ants marched into the house. We could almost hear the drumbeats of war in the distance.

Fear and vertigo gripped my throat like a vise.

The whole forest floor seemed to be alive and seething with eager little rubbery vampires.

We wore Christmas stocking-like ‘leech socks’. Since leeches can get through knitted socks, these special socks are made of woven cloth. They are worn over regular socks, and fastened at the knees with elastic or string. Insecticide is sprayed over the whole leg to dissuade the blood-suckers from climbing up.

How was this transformation possible? I had realized along the way that saying ‘yes’ to every opportunity was like opening a door to a possibility – adventure. I learned that when I jumped all the way in, I was accepting the wild, untamed reality Rom loved so much. I also learned that there was always plenty of time later to wallow in one’s comfort zone, but this moment, when an option presents itself, may never come again . . . so grab it.

He was in a different league altogether – a fruit bat, black kites, rose-ringed parakeets, drongos, mongooses, civet cats, a fox, a jungle cat, tarantulas, a macaw, monitor lizards, a jungle crow, a gila monster, various snakes of course, and many others.

By far, his favourite pet was an Indian python which lived under his bed in the school dorm for about four years. On cold mornings in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, Rom remembered basking in the sun with his pet and some of his friends. If anyone else came by, Rom casually flung a cloth over the snake, and surprisingly no one in school found out.

Rom replied in a mumble, ‘It’s a very friendly . . . cuddly . .. loveable .. . python. Very small. Just eight feet long.’

10 to 15 days went by with no news. The apartment building overlooked a steep slope covered in jungle. Peacocks woke everyone up at 4 a.m., and there were cobras, ratsnakes, birds of many kinds, and large bandicoots. Rom figured the snake could live out its life in this forest without a problem.

Some arrived at my door unbidden as orphans – mongooses, toddy cats, a hare, a koel, and they all left when they became adults.

Rats are pathologically averse to cats; the mere smell of one is enough to drive them away. How does toxo jump from prey to predator? The parasite severs particular neurons in the rat’s brain, without touching any of the other functions, making it fearless of cats. A neurosurgeon par excellence!

The parasite goes even further, fiddling with a neural pathway in the brain so the smell of cats becomes sexually alluring. The poor rodent throws caution to the winds and flaunts itself. Hara-kiri! Toxo hits jackpot and can now merrily reproduce. But this is only one of the world’s parasitical neurosurgeons.

The thin-as-a-strand-of-hair worm grows inside grasshoppers, and after it matures, it doesn’t take the easy way out through the cloaca. Instead it messes with the gra...

The poor insect leaps headlong into a puddle of water with all the confidence of an expert swimmer only to drown. Once its host is dead, the hair...

When it comes time to lay eggs, the barnacle needs a hole in the sand. Since sacculina is incapable of movement, how does it do that? First, it renders the crab impotent so the latter nurtures the parasite’s eggs as its own. Then the barnacle controls the crab to do its bidding and digging. Voila!

Unlike H1N1, toxo is not front page news because it is not believed to be fatal to healthy humans, nor is it infectious. But if you are a baby or your immunity is lowered by drugs or disease, then toxo can take your life.

As Dr Nicky Boulter of the Sydney University of Technology puts it, ‘It can make men behave like alley cats and women like sex kittens.’

(you want to be downwind of an elephant so you can smell it first),

any snorting and blowing (a sloth bear busy with a termite mound).

Should you sense an elephant or bear, you quietly melt away into the forest in the opposite direction. But if your senses fail you and you come face to face with an elephant, what do you do? Climb a tree, run downhill or across boulders; use the topography in your favour. On level ground, zigzag across the forest, never run in a straight line, as surprisingly, elephants can outrun you.

When a bear is engrossed in hoovering up termites, he’s not listening very well. If it is too late to retreat without being noticed, call attention to yourself – cough or whistle just loud enough to alert it. It can be a fine balance between protecting life and limb, and enjoying the pleasures of the wild. Should you startle a sloth bear, there is little chance that it will run away. It lashes out with its long earth-ripping claws, with terrible consequences.

Yet, despite the occasional unpredictable danger posed by wild animals, it is far riskier driving in the city. Few people follow traffic rules, and impatience, road rage and recklessness rule.