My Husband & Other Animals

by Janaki Lenin

try to source local saplings and plants rather than foreigners like the raintree and the gulmohar.

smew, green mango, pewee, fieldfare, brambling, brown trembler, firewood gatherer, buffalo weaver, and green-tailed trainbearer have

in common? They are all names of birds. Bird lists around the world are littered with plenty more bizarre ones – various tyrants (pygmy-tyrant, cattle-tyrant, tit-tyrant), the titmouse, kinglet, morepork, wandering tattler, bananaquit (besides orangequit and grassquit), monotonous lark, zigzag heron, familiar chat and sombre chat.

The cloud-scraping cisticola flies so high that it seems to skim the sky, while the mealy parrot gets its name from the fine dusting of white resembling flour on its back.

The limpkin, a rail-like bird, is named for its limping walk. Steamer ducks of South America are flightless, and when they need to get away fast, they flap their wings while paddling their feet like a paddle steamer.

bearded mountaineer (a hummingbird), jacky winter (a flycatcher), leaf-love (an African bulbul), powerful woodpecker (more powerful than other woodpeckers?) and festive parrot (it doesn’t seem any more colourful than the others).

Bushman’s ascetic lack of possessions, ‘a loin strap, a skin blanket and a leather satchel. There was nothing that they could not assemble in one minute, wrap in their blankets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a thousand miles.’

‘We other races went through Africa [read India] like locusts devouring and stripping the land for what we could get out of it. The Bushman was there solely because he belonged to it.’ There is a need to set aside forests for the sole purpose of wildlife conservation, but the challenge is to do it with empathy and without causing further hardship to already marginalized people.

Freshly caught snakes will frequently bite the bag, and in the case of venomous snakes, the venom they spew corrodes the cotton fabric over time creating weak spots.

The krait must have found one such spot and pushed to its advantage. She quickly jammed it back into the bag and was promptly bitten. The brave lady kept her cool and continued to sit tight, holding the hole closed; none of the passengers were even aware of her predicament. At Spencer’s, she alighted and told the TAS boss that she had been bitten. After securing the snake in another bag, he rushed her to Royapettah Hospital for antivenom serum and she lived to tell her harrowing tale.

monocellate cobras, banded kraits, and spectacled cobras from this village of snake-catchers.

The process is called mithridatization after King Mithridates VI of ancient Turkey who was apparently the first to try it.

While the others thought it was a good idea, Sure Man joked that in this son-besotted country, a snake temple with real snakes would make more money than venom. Women who prayed at termite mounds for a son would flock to a temple with visible, live snakes, he declared.

In the 1970s, most of the Irula were immobile; if they had to get anywhere they walked. No bicycles or public transport for them. You couldn’t blame them – they were paranoid about being identified and getting kicked off buses for carrying snakes. They are a dark people with curly hair, and when armed with a crowbar, their tool of the trade, the Irula stick out from the rest of the population. As with many tribal people, the focus of the Irula’s interaction with the world is to blend in as much as possible.

Namdapha is a large tiger reserve where no one’s seen a tiger in recent years.

‘Have to rake the yard and I get blisters,’ I replied with a big grin. Maybe I should have answered, ‘It’s time to wrangle the anaconda,’ just for the reaction!

when we stupidly believed that captive wild animals were hard-wired with the skills needed to survive in the forest.

On average, a bull mithun stands at 1.7 metres high and can weigh up to a tonne.

Here, in Nyishi territory, these animals play a central role in their cuisine, religion, and economy. A man’s worth is measured by the number of mithun he owns. A calf costs Rs 20,000 and a cow can be more than Rs 40,000, said Radhe. Nyokhum, the annual Nyishi festival, is not complete without a ritual sacrifice of the bovines.

While the men in our vehicle gawked at the pretty ladies in their tribal finery, I was smitten by the gorgeous mithun cows and a calf, the bridal price. They are the most handsome bovines in the world.

fat, venomous water moccasins that scavenged the stinky manna dropping from the trees. Snakes are predators, meaning they like to hunt and kill their own prey. But here, Harvey had discovered that moccasins would even swallow seaweed as long as it smelt of fish.

gaboon viper fangs by Denisse Abreu, one of those rare women in the snake venom business.

Rom thankfully has learnt the art of finding king cobras with his clothes on.

You live on the campus of one of the premier scientific institutions of the country, one carved from a wilderness area, which warrants some adjustments. I’m certain your technological skills and scientific understanding can find ways of adapting to life with bonnet macaques.

Identifying the snake was a tedious process – counting and examining the scales on the head, around the body, along the length of the belly.

Visitors from the city and the local village invariably ask, ‘Aren’t you scared of living alone?’

A friend visiting from South Carolina asked me quietly at the end of his first day here, ‘Do you have a gun?’

Startled, I countered, ‘Why would I need one?’ ‘To protect yourself.’

Having thought long and hard about the security issue, all I can say is that our reputation as weirdoes who keep ghosts, snakes and other creepy-crawlies com...

In any case, reading the papers makes me wonder if the city is a safer place. Neighbours within whispering distance of each other are oblivious to burglaries and murders. Perhaps I ought to be asking the que...

rattlers we had seen that evening such as Mojaves, western diamondbacks and black-tails.

‘Scrub typhus,’ pronounced the doctor. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. It is spread by the larval stage of a large number of trombiculid mite species. These tiny devils target small mammals, like rodents and birds, but accidentally get on humans.

Since the doctor insisted this was a disease of the ‘deep jungle’, I investigated further. ‘Scrub’ is a misnomer as the disease appears to occur in sandy, semi-arid, mountain deserts, rice fields, and even urban areas. In fact, junglies are not the only ones in danger of contracting the disease. A friend who lives on the beach, not far from us, contracted scrub typhus in her home of twenty-odd years.

The word ‘typhus’ comes from the Greek ‘typhos’, meaning ‘hazy,’ referring to the state of mind of the patient. The villain of the piece is Orientia tsutsugamushi (in Japanese, ‘tsutsuga’ means ‘small and dangerous’ and ‘mushi’ means ‘mite’), the parasite that causes scrub typhus. Written records of the disease date back to the 4th century in China and the early 1800s in Japan. Worrisome scientific reports say the disease is re-emerging in several countries, including India. Today, one billion people are exposed to the disease and one million are infected annually. According to the World Health Organization’s website, one can contract scrub typhus anywhere in the ‘tsutsugamushi triangle’ – from Pakistan in the west, to Japan in the east and the islands of Indonesia in the south. In mid-September 2011, scrub typhus outbreaks were reported in Nagaland and Himachal Pradesh. Three people died in the former and more than 13 in the latter. In all these years of visiting jungles around the country, we’ve always dismissed leeches and ticks as minor irritations. Anyone who fussed about getting bitten by them was clearly a novice or a wimp, and we had no patience for his complaints. None mentioned mites, maybe because you can’t see them. Before setting out for the jungle, if we remembered, we’d douse ourselves with insecticide. Ignorant of scrub typhus’ long history of debilitating humans, we were more concerned about the negative influences of chemicals than about diseases.

Better to be a wimp than knock on heaven’s door.

Eventually I learnt experts count the number of scales in a row, down the length of the belly, and examine their arrangement on the head in order to identify the species. No allowances are made to this hands-on approach to identification even when dealing with venomous species.

Malcolm Smith, the father of Indian herpetology, described the two as a new species and named them after their discoverer.

However, the really strange fact is that not only is this pit viper’s closest relative found in Southeast Asia, it is identical to Wagler’s pit viper in looks and scalation. We don’t know what the hemipenis of Hutton’s pit viper looks like as the specimen hasn’t been dissected. The only distinguishing characteristic – the tail of one is longer than the other. Woe betide the herpetologist who finds one with a tail almost the same length as the related species.

Jim Corbett narrate stories of tigers and leopards turning man-eaters after being debilitated by porcupine quills? I asked friends studying these cats if porcupines were part of their normal diet.

M.D. Madhusudan, an ecologist based in Mysore, said he had found dozens of tiger and leopard scats with porcupine quills and hair while working as a research assistant in the early 1990s. So it appeared that the resident prickly rodents were attracting large cats right into the farm.

I wondered how North American tree planters handled their porcupine problems. This is what I found – recipes for porcupine stew and marinated porcupine chops. When our neighbour saw me fencing a tree, he had recommended something similar. His eyes glistened as he salivated, ‘They taste just like pork.’

After three or four years of such desultory farming, we gave up altogether. Instead we planted trees. From our neighbours’ point of view, we were undoing decades of their forefathers’ efforts to clear the land and make it suitable for farming.

We spent lots of money every year keeping the grass low as it was a major fire hazard during the summer. We hoped the shade of the trees would prevent it from growing. Our neighbours, of course, had heard of nothing so daft. They stared at us in incomprehension.

a peacock and his harem would swoop down and peck at the ripening heads of grain. At night, porcupines nibbled on their crops. During peanut season, jackals used our farm as their launching pad to dig and feast on the oil-rich nuts. We had brought the forest closer to the farmers.

Every traditional farmer has his own favourite recipe for the mixture, but generally it contains the five products from a cow – dung, urine, ghee, milk, and curd. All these ingredients are mixed together in an earthen pot and set aside to ferment. This concoction is then diluted in water and sprayed on trees. Farmers swear it does wonders for plant growth, improves the soil, controls pests and induces flowering.

On a recent visit to Yercaud, we met a couple who had an orchard. I asked, ‘What do you do to make trees flower?’ He went through the usual – watering and fertilizing. And then his demeanour became more serious and he suggested that when all else fails, I ought to beat and scold the tree. A jack tree in his garden wasn’t flowering for many years. One night, when his neighbours couldn’t see him, he whacked the tree with an old broom while berating it for not flowering. ‘You have to do it seriously, angrily. You cannot laugh,’ he cautioned. ‘And it worked,’ he summed up triumphantly.

non-venomous grass snakes, venomous adders and the legless slowworms (a lizard really).

You can take us out of the country but never the country out of us.

During the course of Rom’s career as a presenter, this was a recurring problem. Many a good shot had to be sacrificed because of his inability to come up with an appropriate expression. Out of earshot of the crew I suggested, ‘Swear in Tamil, Hindi or Pashto. The suits in Washington won’t notice.’ Rom has a vast vocabulary of expletives in several languages.

Red-sided garter snakes are small, slender snakes up to half a metre long, with a couple of parallel stripes running down their length.