June 17th 2024
I am in the district of Kannur, in one of those unending villages-cum-towns that run right through Kerala, surrounded by plantations of rubber, that are dense and pleasing to see if you have an aerial view, but are immensely harmful to ecology. If that isn’t enough, rubber is a voracious consumer of water (have that conversation with your car tyre sometime).
In the middle of this mirage is a few acres of land being restored - some intrepid folks have uprooted the rubber and are growing a food forest following principles that are rooted in the science of agri-ecology.
And that is where I meet Biju, an unlikely and refreshingly humble hero.
A few minutes of conversation and I can see at once that he is an encyclopaedia on plants, butterflies and mammals. He spent seventeen years as a watcher with the Kerala Forest Dept, all of it as a temporary staffer. This fact is, of course, an awful commentary on pretty much every Forest Department I know but should be interestingly news for those software kids who would like to become Chief Software Architect-cum-AI Evangelist the day after tomorrow and think that python was first a programming language before it became a snake.
His friend tells me, ‘Biju ettan is a hero.’
‘Why?’
‘Tell him etta.’
Biju is reluctant so I let it go. But just for now.
We walk around the land and he explains the principles behind the food forest. ‘Would you like to taste some mint-tulsi? Here’s mangosteen. See the butterflies on the Jamaican Spike - we have recorded 127 species of butterflies in our farm. There are otters in the rivulet below’......there is a childlike excitement, an energy that is infectious and, despite the heat and the humidity, I spend a good hour as a diligent student (who did not take his notebook, of course, so how much is retained is a question you shall promise to not ask).
He insists that we drive up a nearby hill - about midway up we stop to visit a home where the borewell has had water gushing (and I mean GushinG with a capital G at both ends) out of it ever since it was drilled a decade ago, which is stored and piped to the village below in a classic example of enlightened collaboration - to see the view and on the way down he tells me the story of his heroism.
Some years ago, as a watcher, he was guiding a team of three young students studying slender lorises in the dead of night in the Aralam Wildlife Sanctuary. They had puny headlamps with narrow red beams to avoid upsetting the elephants.
And then they stumbled on them. Well, almost.
(stories like this get my pulse racing).
Three elephants stood looming over them just five feet ahead - you read that right - flapping their ears and watching them impassively . Biju stopped, signalled to the students behind him to retreat slowly and waited for them to move away some distance before he retreated one step at a time, observing the pachyderms without turning his head.
The elephants did not move.
‘I was sweating,’ he says.
As he speaks, I am sweating too and it isn’t the heat…..
Three students owe their lives to one person’s experience, composure and sheer bravery, for he put their lives above his.
Biju has a footnote in science as well - he has a local wasp named after him by a grateful entomologist. So the next time someone comes up to you yelping in pain and complaining that a bloody wasp of the genus Tiphia - Tiphia bijuii - has nipped him in the ear, remember to rub some salt into the wound……..
