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What two mighty wild elephants in the Western Ghats taught me

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Rauf Ali
Rauf AliJun 05, 2018 | 11:42

What two mighty wild elephants in the Western Ghats taught me

"But you can’t kick down every door in the universe. And we have more pressing matters to attend to."

— Terry Pratchett, Raising Steam.

The path I followed reached a little stream. A log thrown across the stream served as a bridge; and the drop to the stream bed, covered with sharp-edged rocks, was high enough to frighten. It then curved left and up, going diagonally across the hill face.

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After fifteen minutes it looped around and began traversing the hillside, which was steep on both sides of the path. Massive trees bordered the path. The fog had thickened and made it difficult to see more than a few metres ahead. This was my first time alone in a rainforest and I didn’t like it one bit.

Suddenly a great grey shape loomed out of the mist in front of me, trumpeting. I leapt off the path, lost my footing and went stumbling and lurching down the slope. The grey shape rapidly resolved itself into an elephant. The elephant ran past where I fell off the path, in the direction from which I had come. An adrenalin rush like I’d never experienced before hit me. I sat huddled for an hour, till I was sure the elephant had gone. I then very gingerly went back the way I had come, peeping around every corner.

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Lo and behold, there was a dark shape looming over the tent, and producing loud sniffling noises. Photo: Screengrab

After what seemed an eternity I reached Sengaltheri Forest Rest House, the place that was to be my home for the next couple of years. I decided that this life — filled with nasty brutish animals that frightened one in unexpected ways — was not for me. I would pack up, go back to Bombay, and do a degree in business management.

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The previous day had been traumatic. John Oates, my field supervisor, had dropped me at the bottom of the hill as the road up to the rest house had washed away in the rains.

We found a road crew to carry my stuff up to the rest house, where a boy had been employed to cook for me. Not sharing a language, we communicated with gestures. Since it was raining he couldn’t get the fire lit. I kept moving all night from one part of the room to another as three distinct parts of the roof were leaking: one dripped when it was raining heavily, another came into play when it was drizzling and a third spot after it stopped raining. Not much sleep there.

I woke up the next morning to thick fog. However, since I’d come here to study monkeys, I went off to find some — and found the elephant instead. Or did it find me, I wonder?

When I got to Sengaltheri the cook managed to convey, using crude sign language, that the river below the rest house had risen and couldn’t be crossed. We were cut off for five days. I had five days to get used to the forest and because there was nothing else to do I explored the whole area, found monkeys, followed them and decided that they were interesting. On the fifth day a couple of Oates’ assistants made it to Sengaltheri; John had very thoughtfully sent a packet of cigarettes with them. By this time I’d also started enjoying being alone in the forest. I never discussed the MBA with anybody after that.

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Initial days at Sengaltheri

Once it stopped raining, I walked back down to Kalakad town from Sengaltheri. Magically, porters appeared in the forest when they were required. Three hours down the mountain we reached the town, and suddenly there were people, cows and buses. Sengaltheri was definitely better.

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Suddenly a great grey shape loomed out of the mist in front of me, trumpeting. Photo: Rajesh Bedi

This was one of the first conversations I had: an elderly gentleman came running out of a house on the border of the town and asked, "Excuse me, sir, but are you a central government official studying lifestyles of peoples of the Tirunelveli district?" I burst out laughing. He walked off in a huff.

Then it was back to Kakachi on a nearby tea estate, with John Oates. This time around he realised I didn’t know how to drive a car. I was supposed to take charge of the jeep when he left. We had our first driving lesson that lasted fifteen minutes. A thoroughly rattled John got off, saying it was too dangerous to sit in the car while I was learning, especially on those treacherous mountain roads. However, I could just practise by myself. Which I did, by driving round and round the little golf course in the tea estate. Even if I drove off the road there was no place to get hurt, and there was no traffic. So I survived, and learned — rather fast, because the jeep was left with me soon after.

After a few days I went to the plains again, this time to another part of the sanctuary, the Mundanthurai plateau. To get here, a sojourn through the town of Vickramasinghepuram (abbreviated by everyone to VK Puram) was necessary. This was one of the most congested towns in the area and every time we drove through it we wondered how we had passed through unscathed.

However, the denizens of South Indian villages appear to melt away magically as vehicles approach. The road burst out of the town suddenly into an expanse of rice fields, crossed a river, and suddenly the hills began and with them was the entrance to the wildlife sanctuary. The road climbed along a hill face which overlooked the town and the fields surrounding it, and then went through a cleft in the hills to enter a bowl-shaped valley, through which the Thambraparni river flowed.

At the other end of the valley there were four enormous silver-coloured pipes going down the hillside, into a building at the bottom that was the power generation house for the Lower Thambraparni Dam built in 1935. Next to the pipes was a large sheet of rock that meandered down the hillside. This must have been a magnificent waterfall before the dam was built, and I was once fortunate enough to see it in full flow but it was during a cyclone.

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Running away from elephants: Adventures of a Wildlife Biologist; Rauf Ali; Speaking Tiger; Rs 759

The road skirted the valley and after a series of sharp turns, crossed the pipes, went through another cleft and reached the village of Papanasam Lower Dam, which was to become my base a few years later. It then went through yet another cleft to cross another low range of hills and entered a plateau. This plateau had larger trees than the scrub forest up till now, but a lot of this had been replaced with teak plantations. Over the next few kilometres we saw a few spotted deer. The road then crossed a bridge and we turned off to a magnificent two-storied structure by the riverside. The Mundanthurai Forest Rest House was to be my home for the next year and a half.

The building had been constructed in 1892, and alterations were made in the 1930s to convert its single bedroom into two. Both upstairs and downstairs were essentially one large room with a verandah going around this room on three sides. In both places, one end of the verandah had a bathroom while the other had a spare room, which doubled as spare sleeping accommodation. I was given the downstairs one: a room that was to actually become home during my stay there. Near the rest house there were a lot of dilapidated structures. Local forest staff occupied two of them, a couple of hundred metres away. The rest remained empty as even though there were a number of persons posted here, nobody actually stayed here. They came in their uniforms only when some senior functionary visited.

When I went out the first evening a boy followed me. He spoke a little English so conversation was possible. He was the son of a forest guard posted there. He flooded me with a barrage of questions about what I was trying to do. What was so special about these monkeys? They were the same as any other monkey anywhere. So what if they lived in the forest? Isn’t that what monkeys were supposed to do? Of course the males were bigger than the females, this was the natural order of things. He listened to whatever I had to say and the questions became sharper. He started making astute remarks about what was going on in the group. My problem of finding somebody to help me with the study at Mundanthurai was solved instantly: this was Narayana, who has since, among other things, acquired two Masters degrees, got a doctorate, been a teaching fellow at Harvard University and worked at the Audobon Society.

My research was supposed to be on bonnet monkeys, actually one of the commonest monkeys in southern India. They are the nasty little animals that walk up to you on the road, snatch food from your hand, and threaten you with ugly faces if you have the temerity to object. Up the river from Mundanthurai, I found a group of bonnet monkeys that seemed untouched by humanity. Initially they wouldn’t let me approach. Later the younger animals would come and peer at me. The older animals took a bit longer, but soon most of them settled down and would ignore me at fairly close distances. With the exception of one old female with a missing tail, they all rapidly treated me as part of the landscape. They would run away whenever they saw other humans, with the exception of Narayana. They would see him bringing me things to eat, items at least some of them associated with food. Soon they settled down, and as days passed they allowed me to come closer and closer.

The group had fourteen animals in it. There were two males, one well past his prime — an obviously crotchety and bad-tempered type. There were two sub-adult males, both constantly straying from the group. Both used to occasionally carry infants around — strange behaviour for a male monkey. There were four females, all with very different personalities. Again, one was old and bad tempered. Another would constantly forget her infant and leave him behind at awkward places, to be retrieved, usually, by one of the young males. And then there were a variety of juveniles of various sizes. Two more were born during the study.

I developed Sengaltheri as the second field site. The rest house was leaky and dilapidated, but the view was out of this world. One could look down the forest from around a thousand metres high, down to the plains and across them to the sea about 50 kilometres away. The lighthouse at Tuticorin could be seen every night, and also the harbour, on a clear day. Once I’d settled into the rest house and made it just barely liveable, the forest department woke up both to the fact that it was actually being used, and that the location was fantastic. However, the rest house was uninhabitable by any civilised norms: it had a leaky roof, no bathrooms, no kitchen, and no furniture except for a string cot with broken strings. So they decided to rebuild it.

I had to move out and live in a tent on a narrow bit of land between the building and a drop in front, while it was being rebuilt. At the same time the road up the hill was extended all the way to the rest house. The plan then was to take the road right through the rainforest and link it up with the road going into the tea estate, which would have meant destroying an 8-kilometre-long swathe of rainforest. Luckily, good sense prevailed in this case.

Around this time I had my second elephant experience. One night I heard a noise outside the tent. I opened the flap of the tent and peered out. Lo and behold, there was a dark shape looming over the tent, and producing loud sniffling noises. Jumbo was sniffing away at the tent. There was no place to run, and even if there had been, there was no way I could have outrun the animal with the short distance between us. Terror took over and I pulled the blanket over my head and lay there shivering. After a couple of minutes — which seemed like hours — he must have decided that he had spread enough alarm and despondency for the time being, and went away. I wasn’t very comfortable thereafter in that tent, but there was a decided lack of choices at the time.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to where it all started.

(Excerpted with permission from Speaking Tiger Books.)

Last updated: June 05, 2018 | 11:42
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