Lenin - My Husband and Other Animals 2

JANAKI LENIN writes about a quarter century of adventures with animals while living with snakeman Rom Whitaker. She examines the behaviour of humans with the same droll perspective. Janaki and Rom live on a farm with Momo, Burru, Amba, and Chola (dogs), Neelakanta (emu), and Luppy (pig).

First published by Westland Publications Private Limited in 2018

61, 2nd Floor, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600095

Westland and the Westland logo are the trademarks of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.

Text Copyright Janaki Lenin, 2018

ISBN: 9789386850928

The views and opinions expressed in this work are the authors own and the facts are as reported by her/him, and the publisher is in no way liable for the same.

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Typeset by Ram Das Lal, New Delhi, NCR

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Contents

Janaki, who is my Pistola , is captivated by the creatures we share life with, from our pack of dogs to wild king cobras. She experiences them in ways I tend to miss, opening up new vistas of animal smarts and behaviour. Ever since our local leopard took centre stage, sharpening our senses, weve been pulled into deeper communion with the jackals, porcupines, civet cats, monkeys, birds, reptiles, trees, plants and insects that share our farm.

Weve lived here at Pambukudivanam for 20 years now and many are the trees we planted that you cant put your arms around. Orioles, treepies, woodpeckers, kingfishers, spotted owlets and parakeets also call it home, and the resident ratsnake regularly sheds his 7-foot-long skin below the expansive banyan tree shading our house. Indian eagle owls hoot each evening from Karadi Malai, the forested hill in front of us and in the early morning sun the pair of booted eagles soar.

While others might be happy to just watch these creatures, Janaki goes many steps further. Her fixation with animal poop for example is in another league: is that rat shit or frog shit on the kitchen counter, lets wash the leopard scat and see what hes been eating, and could that mysterious animal that left the ant-filled dump have been a pangolin?

All my life Ive been a reptile nut, and for the first decade of our lives together, Janaki joined me in my pursuits as herpetologist, filmmaker, and communicator. Perhaps tiring of my single-track mind, she struck out on her own, making friends with professionals who study mammals, birds and insects. Her stories are drawn from tracking these field biologists, our own adventures, and her deep fascination with the natural world.

Janaki weaves our travels to the Agumbe rainforest, Andaman islands, Assam and other locales into a wonderful magic-carpet ride. Shes also prone to disappearing down the proverbial rabbit hole in the quest for answers: why didnt the fishing cat make it down to south India (or did it?) and how the hell do oystercatchers teach their young to shuck oysters and clams? Until she finds answers, shes as restless as a mama cat with her kittens.

These stories are mostly taken from her four-year-long string for The Hindu and share some similarities with the earlier volume, but here she also waxes scientific. She balances animal tales with personal stories such as how we met Falling in Love and how we became partners Marriages are Made on Earth and some serious pieces like Why do Men Rape, and An Appeal to Nature , and Why Did Homosexuality Evolve that have deep insights into human behaviour.

In the best tradition of the Indian snack called mixture, this collection has equal parts of the whimsical, serious, tragic, and hilarious.

Romulus Whitaker

Pambukudivanam

20 October 2017

W hen the first volume of My Husband and Other Animals was published, I asked a friend for marketing advice. Her first question was, Have you written about tigers?

No, I havent.

Although the friend moved on to other questions, I imagine others will ask me the same thing.

A shiver of excitement runs through friends when they describe their encounters with tigers. For many, the sight of a large cat striding regally down a forest path is what sparks their lifelong interest in wildlife. My interest in animals was, however, ignited in the backyard of my parents home in the city.

When I met Rom, he showed me cobras in neighbouring rice fields, monitor lizards in rock piles, and chameleons on trees near pump houses. During the monsoon, we visited seasonal ponds in casuarina plantations along the coast near the Madras Crocodile Bank to see frogs and toads. If the season was right, we spent hours on the beach watching the waves glow with the eerie blue-green luminescence of plankton. What is nature; what is the wild confuse me. On winter nights, trees flashed with the courtship displays of thousands of fireflies. After experiences such as these, questions such as What is nature; where is the wild? confuse me.

Rom took me to forests, too, but to the wettest ones where rare snakes, lizards, and frogs live. The chances of seeing a tiger there were very low. We also spent a lot of time in the Andaman Islands where there are no tigers. We were not interested in the forests of central India for a simple reason: they may be great for tigers, but not for the creatures we sought.

I finally saw my first tiger in Bandipur, in 2005, on a family holiday. We didnt see enough of it to say we saw a tiger, but neither could we say we saw nothing. The news reached the hotel ahead of us, and everyone greeted us as if we had seen Brad Pitt and Salman Khan, hand-in-hand. I dont remember anyone expressing as much excitement when Rom and I watched the glorious spectacle of a pair of big male king cobras wrestling for a full two hours.

A few years after the visit to Bandipur, we travelled to Bandhavgarh. Rom was to present a short movie showcasing Indias chief wildlife tourism assetthe tiger. When someone spotted the striped cat, word went out, and safari jeeps raced down dirt roads, eager to get their clients there before the animal moved. Not unlike how poachers operate, I imagine.

The forest department conducted tiger shows. Tame elephants cornered a tiger in an inaccessible spot, and for a price, tourists were taken on elephant-back to see the obviously bored cat. It wasnt a wildlife park so much as an open-air zoo experience. Unlike many of the other creatures for whom we waited hours and hours and made numerous journeys into the forest before being blessed with a sight, here tigers materialized as instantly as they do on television. It didnt have the quality of a wildlife documentary as much as a wildlife Big Brother .

Outside the park, we saw sarus cranes fling their heads up in the air and call raucously as they danced in fallow wheat fields. The birds seemed freer than those poor tigers imprisoned in the wild.

I dont deny the tiger is a magnificent animal, but it has also become a commodityfor hunters, conservationists, poachers, tourists, entrepreneurs, photographers, researchers, rheumatic Chinese, and for countless writersfor a long time.

When you read the adventures of big-game hunters in Africa or Asia, there is invariably a menacing mamba or an aggressive cobra they dispatch to prove their machismo. In my writing career, I naturally correct this imbalance by giving snakes and other less charismatic animals their rightful place in the galaxy of wildlife stars. Now you see why I dont write about tigers. I hope readers will forgive my bloody-mindedness!