JOIN USA medley of raucous love
Animals are an intrinsic part of our lives, says Lee Durrell in her foreword to Usha Rajagopalan’s new book. Lee’s husband Gerald Durrell wrote hilarious accounts of the adventures he, his menagerie and his family had in various places. In a similar vein, The Zoo In My Backyard describes the rather unusual pets Rajagopalan had while growing up in Kerala.
The rich supporting cast includes her colourful siblings, her scholarly father and grandfather and her formidable grandmother. The delightful stories, some of which were published in this newspaper a few years ago, will have you chuckling and sometimes guffawing at the antics of a raucous brood of kids, their pets and their comic capers.
Wild tales
Rajagopalan’s father was a wildlife custodian in the Indian Forest Service. Thanks to his job, he sometimes brought home injured and orphaned animals that would be nursed back to health by the family before being handed over to the Thiruvananthapuram Zoo. Among such enviable, if temporary pets were Kuttan the baby elephant, Kesavan the monkey, Judie the flying squirrel, Mini the mouse deer and Suku, another monkey (the last so named because of her weak stomach: Suku is the Tamil word for flatulence, spelt backwards). Apart from this, there were three dogs, a parakeet, peafowl, budgerigars, pigeons and more.
The animals were an integral part of her formative years and played starring roles in her many escapades. Rajagopalan is an engaging raconteur. Her tales of Kesavan the monkey
who took to removing the fuses from the fuse box, plunging the house into darkness every
once in a while; her gentle, ‘Gandhian’ dog Tommynathan, who had to be taught to bark; her
dog, Maxi, who sat in on her music lessons and accompanied her Carnatic vocals with his
soulful howling, had me chortling immoderately.
I was left with bittersweet feelings reading Rajagopalan’s lively portrayal of a noisy childhood in a large, rambling home filled with children and with the attendant, unalloyed delights of gardens, mud and trees, of days filled with innocent pastimes like stilt-walking or chopping up earthworms to feed fish. It evoked a sense of hiraeth in me, a wistful yearning for a land and a simpler way of life that is lost to most of us.
Rajagopalan maintained her interest in animals and nature throughout her life. It was this early passion that later moved her to activism. In Bengaluru, she led a campaign to revive the dying Puttenahalli lake near her home and helped establish the Puttenahalli Neighbourhood Lake Improvement Trust. She also conducts nature walks at the lake for children.
Zoo In My Backyard is an enjoyable read that also carries a deeper lesson — growing up with nature is important. Innumerable studies have shown that access to green spaces is profoundly important for our psychological and physical health. Recent research has also
linked greater interaction with nature as children with better mental wellbeing as adults. Living in crowded, concrete jungles, few of us now have access to the joys of squelching in mud, catching dragonflies or even climbing trees. For those of us living in small apartments, even pet dogs are an impossibility.
But, dense urban areas have their share of wildlife too. We recently had a large Argiope spider make its home in our balcony. Over the next few days, the kids spent hours watching their new ‘pet’ weave her web. Feeding experiments revealed that our spider didn’t like noodles, but relished the caterpillars they harvested from our cauliflowers. She produced egg sacs and then came the exciting day when the babies hatched and ballooned away in their hundreds, catching the wind with their silk filaments. Nature thrives even in our backyards.