JUNGLY FEELINGS - 2

June 2022

A Giant Web

We are in the jungle, and it is dark.

It looks quite welcoming at first and we begin wafting about, gazing at the tall trees and the understory, excited to discover new creatures. Akhil lets us be.

‘Bhaiyya … bhaiyya don’t move.’

Given my propensity to walk backwards, J’s caution comes not a moment too soon. I pivot around to see him staring at a bright yellow-orange thing hanging mid-air six inches behind me.

‘I thought it was a flower but it started moving’, he says. ‘What is it? See from this side, it looks like Ludo dice.’

His analogies can be perplexing but you do finally see.

We stare at it for a while, this colourful spider with horns. I find out later that this is the Long-horned orb weaver, and both J and D keep announcing that they have found yet another Ludo.

I continue to be amazed by the sheer number and variety of spiders that exist on this planet. They are everywhere, and they are supremely sophisticated and efficient web designers. They are on the grass and plants, and some even weave their gossamer across trees, like giant hammocks. It is easy to walk into them face first. You stay edgy for a long time after.

One of the orb weavers is particularly lucky, watching its food stockpiling as several flies crash into the silk trap. We try to stay non-partisan. In the wild, the law of the jungle, it is difficult to take sides.

We come upon in a dark corner of soggy leaves what looks like a tumultuous orgy of beetles. My sincere but unreliable research says these are the Red-shouldered bug. Some look so lost, they walk over mounted pairs. Some seem to be sulking.

Romance can be more random than one might want to believe.

My associates look unsettled by this lascivious conduct, their moralities offended. They leave it at, ‘This is strange behaviour.’

The monsoon is staggered this year, so is the mating season. In a small pond where rainwater has collected, several pairs of damselflies are locked in an embrace which might have given rise to the coinage of sixty-nine. For odonates, that’s the only way. For humans, it's a knotty libidinous detour.

D beckons me a few feet away to a pair of firmly affixed toads, one pinkish and the other yellow. In a stream near the pond are quite a few of these couplings. Then there’s this frustrated single male that keeps trying to offload a luckier rival from the female, only to be kicked away fiercely. Despite several such violent rejections, he doesn’t give up, this stellar example of resilience and persistence.

It's likely that the person who invented the word 'toady' for obsequious behaviour hadn't observed toads enough.

J seems to have lost interest in this poolside mating carnival, and is frowning at something in the distance. I sidle up. “It is a black pipe but I think it moved,” he says.

The moving black pipe, as we discover soon enough, turns out to be a rat snake about nine feet long, about seven feet away from us. My snake prayers have been answered. Snake and human freeze for a few minutes of quality time.

Silence saturates the air, and no two silences are the same.

A soft flutter, followed by hysterical cackling laughter, crashes into the silence. The snake melts away. Four large birds have landed on a tree dotted with berries. The Malabar grey hornbill loves to announce its arrival.

The machete man, watching with amusement and concern my adoration of snakes, says something which is translated thus: 'This guy looks crazy. I don’t want him to get so foolhardy with a pit viper, and there are several here.'

I like to believe that I have earned his respect.

The clouds thicken, it looks like rain, and the machete man chaperones us back, hacking away. I pause now and then to watch a beetle I’ve never seen before, or a leaflike frog in the undergrowth, or strikingly coloured grasshoppers, leafhoppers and treehoppers - and of course yet another spider.

I feel I have been watching a film of formidable beauty, one without subtitles and subtext.

The machete man takes us to his machaan at the edge of the jungle. I feel like asking him if I can stay there overnight but I let that thought drift away. That line by Aldo Leopold drifts in, making me wistful: ‘I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.’

The jungle, in all, has been momentarily intimate, even if she emanates a future sense of detachment.

A puppy is yipping, sign that we are back into the familiar. Feral cats are lounging around.

The jungle seems to be kinder to me since that visit, sending me her bounties.

Across my balcony, which is surrounded by patches of forests, is an abandoned old compound and several large trees. Within the next few days we see the vernal hanging parrot, barbets, flameback woodpecker, rat snakes, mongoose, several dragonflies including what D calls Bhagwaan titli – the pied paddy skimmer.

Nature can reassert herself if we give her some room.

The Jungle Within

The jungle changes you, or perhaps simply unpeels the layers you have gathered over a lifetime of trying to become someone - and then someone else.

As we head home, the silences and sounds quickly give way to the roar of a civilization in a hurry. I withdraw from the madding crowds, retracing my inner journey of the past few months.

A lot has shifted within and around. A castaway by choice, my retreat from urbanity has led me to a gypsyish lifestyle.

I have come across fascinating new people and other animals. Many have, in brief interactions, made tangible impressions.

I have updated many of my myths about myself, myths I have been overselling to myself. I have paused to look at my embellished past and imagined future.

Memory, desire and imagination now lie mingled in an unhewn clump of clay.

Random theories and questions float about in my head. Some settle.

- There is no ‘splendid isolation’ free of emotional engagements and encumbrances.

- There is such vanity in proclaiming that you have ‘conquered’ a mountain.

- I go about conducting sessions on recasting narratives, and here I am losing mine.

- We know very little about nature. Do we need to know more?

- The only way to truly love nature is to leave her alone.

- The anthropomorphic perspective is clearly deficient, but what choice do I have?

- Is the human predicament a natural one where everyone sees you as an opportunity or competition? As prey, predator or partner?

I don’t have any answers. I am not sure that I want any.

~*~