My Farmily and Other Animals

I reach the farm around 9 this morning, the morning after a night of gentle, persistent rain.  The air is heavy with moisture and the tall grass greets me with a fragrance, while its bushy heads brush against my skin.  I pick my way carefully on the soft, wet earth, for the-morning-after is time for the Kingdom of Animalia.  This is mid-day already for the birds – white-headed babblers (damn their new name), bushchats, bulbuls, tailor birds, sunbirds, white-eyes, mynas and the odd bushlark me thinks, though I am missing the chatter of the white-browed bulbul family that’s usually around the young mango.  As I open the house door and deposit the bag, a wasp from the in-house nest greets me with a buzz, a menacing keep-away whirr.  Two of her female ancestors had given me a nasty sting some years ago, so I get this message well (males are the benign, retiring type who’d rather curl up with a book than pick a fight, and that’s why we’ll get along well if we e’er meet).  Over the years, I have removed the wasp nest often (after saying my prayers), but they always return and the last time Anand, my extraordinary brains trust, was asked his opinion, he lit a quick small fire and finished them off, which destroyed not just the wasps but my heart as well.  So, I have decided to let live (and not provoke the females, after all this #MeToo stuff).   

Anand and I walk to the back of the farm, a patch of horse gram (huruli) that is as nutritious as it is unfussy to grow.  The lush sight is a delight to see, the little saplings waving excitedly in the breeze.  He shows me the impressions of the hoof of wild boar as it traversed through the patch to the ragi across, being grown, thankfully, by my neighbour (who is not averse to occasional flavouring of rice-and-curry with some bacon).  Even as we stand there, a small flock of baya weaver birds descend on the guava tree by the small pond and their excitement suggests that it’s nesting time – indeed, monsoons is when they work their magic.  The path is dotted with gorgeous lemon-yellow butterflies – the Common Grass Yellow – flitting about with purpose, in which pursuit, of course, they differ vastly from me. 

Did I just hear a Crested Serpeant Eagle?  It isn’t to be seen, which is odd, but the call – that deceivingly plaintive cry – is, as an Ornithologist would say in his tongue, diagnostic. “Do not enter the Tuvare (toor dal) patch, Sir,” Anand says, “there is a bee hive there.”  Which, of course, is great news for pollination.  I would not have entered the Tuvare anyways, for it has grown taller than I am and is densely packed – a walk through this would have had the heart doing a lively gig.   

We begin the walk to the front of the farm – the Western side, so to speak -  and, a few steps ahead, a grey francolin (a big name for a partridge) takes off just ahead, giving me quite a start and Anand a hearty laugh.  A month ago, I had seen their dainty little nest with eggs under a clump of grass.  They are generally heard more than seen, yet they are lovely birds, tubby and compact, in the line of evolutionary thought that includes quails and pheasants.  Thankfully, in our area, they aren’t caught for the table (well, at least to my knowledge). 

We are now past the little patch of greens that I am looking forward to eating next month (if not beaten to it), and Anand stops all of a sudden and points to a solitary scat on the path.  “Jungle cat,” he says with assuredness, and I feel a thrill, for this is a first.  “It seems to have gone this way last night.”  As we walk further, he points, with disappointment, to the now-sparse patch of jowar by the water-channel.  “The monkeys came a couple of days ago and destroyed this,” he says in irritation, and I share the emotion, not being particularly fond of bonnet macaques.   

Even as we stand there, staring at the soil, he bends down and examines a paw print in the soft earth.  Hares, two of them, went by last night too, their prints and droppings pointing the way.  At one point they seemed to have both stopped to deposit an entire load of droppings and I can, in my mind’s eye, see them now:  the male standing up and sniffing nervously, looking around all the time, with his black-tipped ears twitching like vibrant antennae.  I love to see hares bound across a field in a sprint that can leave you breathless and awed.  They are, in a phrase, Nature’s great dashers.  When in my teens, I read an eerie story called “The Rabbit’s Paw” (read it at your peril), but it only enhanced my fondness for rabbits (and, by extension, their Indian cousins).   

At my foot is a tiny LadyBird beetle.  Can Nature be more resplendent than this?  “We call it Guruganji vola (insect),” Anand says in reponse to my question and, on reflection, this is a brilliant name.  Guruganji is the local name for Abrus Precatorius (or the Crab’s Eye), which is Kunnikuru in Malayalam.  The LadyBird looks just like the Crab’s Eye, so what could be better than naming an insect after a seed that it resembles?  Damn the science, admire the simplicity.   

After Anand leaves for lunch, I stroll on my own – there’s a treepie up there, and his cousins, the crows, come around when I have lunch.  They know that I will give them a piece or two, not just of food, but of my mind as well.  My Great-Grandmother, a woman of incredible fortitude with a toothless grin and a yawning earlobe, used to keep one ball of rice for the crows on the low roof at the back, for these were, she insisted, her ancestors reborn, who would keep an eye out for her.  I share no such sentiment (or perhaps I do).  She, my Great-Grandma, lived to the age of 98, so the crows have a trick we don't quite know about.

I am in the porch and, taking a step forward, I see a movement on the stone patch a few feet to my left.  A striped keelback – a beautiful, harmless snake – is moving rapidly away from me, for the last thing it wants is to be near humans.  The moment it enters the grass I know that I have lost it for good. 

I must be honest, I miss Colonel Haathi.  It’s been a while since he visited, but I know that when the ragi is ready to be taken, you can’t keep a good elephant away.