Survival of the Fittest

Sorry folks. Another long blog to let you know I'm alive and also what I've been through. Read it like a novel. I've separated it haphazardly into"Parts" so you can read it at your leisure like a story book.
Enjoy.

Part 1

WE were still in the house in Calcutta where we were being graciously hosted by the rich old man and his cousin and daughter. The night before, I'd survived watching a "surgery" done on a cat. Not just any cat. An awake cat. And not just any awake cat. A very pregnant, awake cat. They removed her uterus, kittens and all.

They made me feel the abdomen and feel all the kittens wriggling around in there before they sliced in.

The cat began wriggling around and yowling like crazy when they sliced into her belly and then they pulled out her engorged uterus where about four kittens were wriggling around inside. Sarah and Ronalee refused to watch and Judy and I stood there, stunned. Judy started protesting first, despite the fact that our hosts were just in the next room and would hear us. The vet brushed her off. I lost it then and there and begged the vet to stop. He didn't and our host came in and it was a big kerfuffle.

In the end, there was nothing we could do. I left the room feeling really really emotional and they just gave me a cup of tea and I sat beside the fan so the whirring would drown out the screams coming from the cat from the next room over.

AFterwards, I went into the room and saw the uterus, still full of kittens, lying in the dustbin. I poked at it and it was cold. The kittens were dead, but who knows how long they lay there suffering. My hope is that their mother went into shock and won't remember the pain from the surgery and that the kitten just drowned instantly in their placental fluids or suffocated when the vet tied off the uterine blood vessels.

Little did I know that dead kittens were going to be the least of my worries in the next few days.




I slept horribly that night. I was restless and woke up at 6am to the sound of the servant bringing in our morning tea and biscuits. It was still somewhat dark out and miraculously, i felt cold. A/C is a magical thing.

I wandered up to breakfast where our host and his family wisely said nothing to us about the surgeries the night before. We were greeted by a splendid meal of fried eggs, Indian coffee, toast with cheese spread and mango jam and fresh sliced mango. WE were eating well becasue today, we were to go to the Sunderbans. Land of hte man-eating tigers, salt water crocs, and man-eating sharks. In the Sunderbans, it's man against nature . . . and nature usually wins.

We were also greeted by the figure of a mysterious Indian man sitting in one of hte chairs in the corner of the room, calmly reading a book. He was wearing a hat and all khaki outfit with binocculars around his neck and looked like he was straight out of a novel. I offered to pour him some coffee.

He looked up at me and for the first time, i saw his eyes.

They were a clear green, even more clear as they were set against his brown, lined skin. they were eyes that looked like they had seen things which should not have been seen. Eyes that look through you and see beyond. Rasputin eyes.

I asked him again if he wanted coffee.

He didn't answer and looked back down to the book he was reading.

We finished our breakfast and packed up the van and off we went. The mysterious man was accompanying us and the entire drive out to the village, he was silent.

We passed by lush green fields, giant pools of water, rice paddies, mud huts, cows,cows, more cows and plenty of magical looking people. It was straight out of the jungle book and I was enchanted.

The three hour drive seemed to take no time at all and it was only when we arrived at a dingy little village and got out that I noticed both my legs were cramped and asleep. As I waited for the blood to rush back into them, I look around. Curious villagers crowded around, staring at us like we were freaks of nature. The myseterious man waved them aside and carrying our sacks, led us to the docks where a blue wooden boat was waiting for us.

We loaded on and set off. "We go straight into the jungle!" said one of our guides.

And so it was. We sailed for an hour past grass huts and fishing boats on the banks of the river. Eventually, the huts grew less and the trees grew thicker. These weren't any trees though. They were mangroves, some of the most endangered trees in the world. This place was full of them. In fact, while I had been expecting a palm-tree/rainforest type jungle, the Sunderbans is actually comprised mostly of mangrove forests. Big swampy areas covered with trees on stilts.

We docked, finally, at a little wooden platform where macaques and their little babies were chattering at us and fear grinning. Below them, mud skippers were everywhere and hopping around on their ridiculous fins. Bright red fiddler crabs were duking it out on the banks of the river and i gawked at the giant telescope snails lying everywhere.

It was a biologist's dream. The mysterious man beckoned me on and I followed him ahead of hte rest of our party. It was a well-tread path and the first thing we encountered was a giant stone shrine in the middle of hte forest with a faded statue of the Hindu nature goddess, Bonobibi, riding a tiger. The mysterious man stopped, bowed his head and tossed a few coins into the bowl in front of the shrine. He stood there for a few seconds in silent contemplating, then waved to me to keep walking again.

WE got to a watchtower, built int he middle of the jungle by the early park wardens and I was about to ask the man something when he 'shhhed' me. I walked up the stairs of the watchtower in silence. Mid-way up, he stopped and turned to me. It was the first time he'd spoken to me directly.

"MY father used to own this land before the government took it from my family. I grew up here and I love this place." He had a faraway look in his green green eyes.
I nodded, unsure of what to say.
"Over there. You see?" he said and pointed at a clearing in the trees below us.
I looked at the clearing and nodded.
"That's where my friend was killed by a tiger."

He turned and kept walking, leavnig me standing there gawking at the trees.

It was broad daylight and birds were singing innocently in the sun. The mangroves looked so peaceful and try as i might, i just coundlt concieve that somehwere below, blood-thirsty tigers were lurking around.

Perhaps that was the cunning of this jungle. That was how it got you. I felt a cold chill go through me that had nothing to do with the searing hot weather.

We spent the rest of the day trekking around inside wire fences erected in the forest to protect the honey collectors and fishermen from the tigers. I learned from our guide and from Armelia, the old man in Calcutta's cousin, that the myseterious man we were travelling with is named Kumar and is a reknown biologist and scientist. He'd travelled twice on expeditions to the Antarctic and survived several tiger attacks and was someone you desperately wanted with you if you were to survive in the jungle.

Part 2

That first day, we saw some white spotted deer, a few giant water monitor lizards, more monkeys and more song birds. The birds are incredible. More colourful than anything I'd ever seen. Kumar seemed to be able to identify each one on sight and just from their calls. He'd mimic thier calls back and the birds would echo back perfectly.

We hopped back on the boat and sailed on the river until sunset when we pulled up to a giant white guesthouse that seemingly appeared out of nowhere on the banks of the river. We unloaded and walked through the fragrant jasmine and rose garden to the front gates where we were met by a lovely man who led us to our rooms.

"Don't turn on the lights long. insects," he said to us and left to go make our dinner.

"Meh, a few moths, whatever. We're tough." we all thought and turned on the lights to get ready for dinner.

A few moths flew in. We ignored it. This was soon joined by a few tiger beetles. Then more beetles. More bugs. Earwigs. Flies. Flying ants. Giant dung beetles. Gnats. Thrips. Midges.

Our walls were covered. Our beds were covered. We tried desperately to pull down our mosquito nets but the bugs were already swarming over our sheets.
"FOR F*CK'S SAKES PUT OUT THE LIGHT!" I screamed, but no one did. We were too busy trying to swat the insects off our skin and out of our hair.

Finally, we made our way over to the light switch and turned it off. It was only in the dark that i noticed the sound. It sounded like rain pattering on hard pavement. "Tap tap. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap tap."

It wasn't rain, it was bugs. Bugs hitting the wall, hittin ghte floor, hitting our skin, hitting each other. Sarah, our veteran hater of all things creepy crawly just sat there frantically clawing at herself. She has hair down to her waist and she madly shook it out, causing more pitter pattering of bugs as they fell out of her hair onto the floor.

"IT's like a horror movie, but I'm living it!" she wailed.

The guest house owner came to tell us that dinner was ready. I walked out of our room, feeling each sickening "crunch" of my footsteps as they crushed the millions of insects underfoot.

"Feels like stepping on fortune cookies!" I quoted. It really did.

We made it down to dinner, passing Kumar on the way through the hallway. He was watching the black swarming crowd of insects on the hallway light with fascination. "The sunderbans hosts the world's third largest insect population." I asked him, as I warded off a dragonfly the size of a bird (I am not exagerrating. I'm serious. It was as big as a robin.), what the places with the most dense insect populations are.
"The Amazons," he said and at that moment, the dragon fly came back and launched itself with a horrific crash into the wall two feet from my head. I didn't wait to hear the other place and bolted down the rest of the hallways and staircase to the dinner hall.

Dinner was delicious. Somewhere in the night, I could hear chanting over the animal sounds of the jungle.

The whole time , we had to eat in semidarkness to keep away the bugs. The chanting was unnerving and it sounded like a buddhist monastery, only it was the voices of children. It really was like a horror movie.

My food was crunchy. They told me it was prawn curry so I assumed they just hadn't shelled the prawns. They turned on one light finally. I took another bite of curry and felt one of hte prawn shells. I spat it out and looked down on my plate. It was a beetle.

Oh well. Good protein.

After dinner, the owner of the guest house insisted we go up to the top of the building with him. As we mounted the bug covered steps, the chanting became louder and I got more and more nervous. My bird/dragonfly hybrid buddy came back to say hello and the loud chanting was just adding to the drama.

When we got up there, all became clear. The sky was clear and the stars shone brightly. Barely any insects were on the roof. Instead, a group of about 50 children were sitting on some towels in what appeared to be a rooftop night school. They were chanting something over and over.

The guide spoke to us in Bengali excitedly and Armelia and Kumar translated for us. These were tiger orphans. Children whose parents had been killed by tigers. They live at the guest house and the guest house and the boat we were using are all rented out to us with proceeds going towards them and their education.

They had stopped chanting at this point and were looking at us curiously . It was hard to imagine what it must be like to know your parents wre eaten by tigers. Some of them looked barely 3 years old while some as old as 14 or 15 were sitting there looking at us.

I walked back down the crunchy steps to my room, listening to the jungle sounds. "Dont go out alone at night." said Kumar darkly and went into his room. As if he needed to tell me twice.

"What is this place?" I wondered to myself.

I went into our room to find SArah frantic and Ronalee and Judy swiping bugs off our bed in handfuls. Someone had turned on our light when we went to dinner and our room was COVERED in them.

SArah ran screaming from the room and declared she wouldn't sleep in it. Ronalee and Judy and I crowded onto the bed, pulled down the mosquito nets, shook them out (more pitter pattering on the floor as bugs landed) and attempted to scoop more bugs off the bed. It was impossible. As soon as you got one handfull off, another million would swarm on. Eventually, we left it and just lay down and forced ourselves to go to sleep.

I lay down in the dark and felt crunching under me. I plugged my ears with my fingers, pursed my lips and curled into fetal position, trying to ignore the feeling of insects crawling all over my body. It was when they were crawling up my legs towards my crotch that I finally lost it.

I ran like a madwoman out of the room clawing beetles out of my hair and slapping the bugs off my thighs under my skirt. I saw a lawn chair in the hallway that seemed like it had less bugs as it was in a shadow away from the lights. I pulled another stool up to it and used that as an ottoman. There were some bugs, but a lot less. I sat there in my t-shirt and skirt and eventually, joined by Sarah in the lawnchair beside me, I fell alseep. It was a restless sleep and I heard Ronalee cursing occasionally from our bedroom and Sarah freaking out occasionally as another batch of insects had crawled into her hair.

Part 3

I woke up in the morning to a strange prickly feeling on my one foot that had slipped off the ottoman in the night. The sun was just rising and in the morning light, I saw the carnage o the night before.

Crushed beetles and bugs of all sizes lay everywhere and in the dawn light, the ants where trooping out in hordes to collect the bodies. I looked under my foot. A giant dung beetle was being swarmed by little tiny ants and some had crawled onto my foot. I brushed them off, shook out my sandals for a good 15 minutes before finalyl having to pick out all the bugs from the velcro straps by hand.

I wandered downstairs to the dinner hall in the off chance that there would be someone awake so I could get some tea. It was then I noticed I was itching all over. I looked down at my arms and legs and discovered I was covered in giant red itchy welts.

I looked out the window of the hall and Kumar was already up and stalking around the mango grove looking at songbirds, insects and plant species. The man was insane.

He motioned me down and pointed out a magpie robin's nest with three beautiful blue eggs in it. It was in the jasmine trellis outside the door. Then he dragged me over to the other side of hte garden to show me a swift's nest with three hatchlings in it. How he found all that in the few short minutes since the sun had risen is beyond me.

He looked at the welts on my arms and legs and said, "biting midges. they leave a bit of their mouth parts in your flesh when they bite. it will take 15 days to clear up."

My limbs were swollen and bulging and itching to distraction. I finally had to put on long pants and sleeves so that hte owner of the guest house and some of the children that were awake would stop gawking at my hideous presence. I was itching beyond pain and distraction. I was a mad woman.

Eventually, the others woke up. We all had dark rings under our eyes and were silent as we drank our chai. Ronalee insisted on taking pictures of the back of my legs and arms. I asked her not to show me as I didn't want to gross myself out at the time. I looked at them later and was absolutely horrified.

After chai, we loaded back onto the boat and set off into the thick of the jungle again.

On our way, we passed by a few ladies trawling nets along the bank of the river. Kumar asked our boat driver to stop beside them and he chatted to them for a while. He eventually walked back to our side of the boat hodling out a flat pan filled with little tiny gasping fish and sand. The women had been trawling for tiger prawn larvae to sell to the shrimp farms. The women had only found a dozen or so prawn larvae and they'd been trawling since 5 in the morning. The fish and million other species in the pan were the bycatch.

But such is the way of the jungle here. EVen though it destroys their biodiversity and environment, the villagers continue to trawl for prawn larvae because it's the only thing that will give them the meagre money they need to survive. It's either that or honey-collecting or fishing.

Kumar made us look harder at the ladies. They had wrinkled faces and greying hair. I felt sorry for the old ladies that even at their old age, they would be forced to do such back break work as drag a net trhough mud for 12 hours a day. "Life expectancy is 30-35 years for these ladies," said Kumar. "They die of diseases from the water, and from sharks and crocodiles feeding on them. Don't be surprised this afternoon if we come back to hear one of them has been taken."

I felt sick and helpless sitting there watching them, these old ladies straining in the mud with their nets. I wondered if Kumar was pulling our leg about hte life expectancy of these women. Surely they were over the 30 -35 age mark.

"How old do you think the lady in the pink sari is?" asked Kumar.

I was guessing 50 or 60 but I didn't say anything.

He asked her in Bengali for her age and turned back to me. "She's 24."

I was stunned.

With that, Kumar ordered our driver to keep going. About ten minutes downstream, we watched a giant 6 foot crocodile slink into the river, heading back towwards where we had just come from. I closed my eyes and said a little prayer.

Part 4

It was a slow day in terms of seeing wildlife in the jungle. We stopped at a different watch tower and watched some spotted deer grazing in the shade of hte mngrove trees while the jungle fowl and crazy birds cackled in the trees.

Kumar opened up a lot more and we got to ask him about his experiences with tigers and his trips to Antarctica and the Amazon and Africa. He described how he saw a tiger attacking a young boy's cattle herd. The boy began hitting the tiger with a stick to defend his cattle and with one swipe, the tiger decapitated the boy. It ran into the jungle where Kumar had followed it and lost it. Then, he saw two glowing red eyes in the shadows in the trees. He pulled out his gun and let out a shot but next thing he knew, he was lying in a pool of blood on the ground. He dragged himself out of the jungle and made it to a hospital. Days later, he found the same tiger beside the river and finally killed it.

It had left him with a brutal scar down his shoulder and left leg. The monsoon rains suddenly hit us and in the distance, we saw lighting. Kumar suddenly became very still and quiet and herded us down the stairs of the watchtower. The rain came down in buckets, quickly turning the canopy walkway we had come on into a giant river. We huddled at the base of the watchtower and Armelia said, "Oh the rain will pass in ten minutes. We'll just wait it out here."

The thunder got louder and the rain, if possible, came down harder. Suddenly, the thunder got louder. Kumar got a strange look in his eyes. "This rain's not going to stop in ten minutes. Get back to the boat."

Another clap of thunder sounded and I could feel it vibrate through my body. My hairs vibrated with the sound.

"GET BACK TO THE BOAT NOW!" he shouted and we ran.

We were drenched by the time we got back and while Sarah and Ronalee went into the cabin to dry off, Judy, Kumar and I stood outside in the rain in our rain jackets, taking it all in. We were silent for a while, just listening ot the rain rushing onto the water around us. I finally broke the silence and asked Kumar about his adventures in Antarctica.

"I was studying the effects of magnetic storms on people."
"And?"
"It makes them go crazy." he said and puffed on his pipe.

I waited for him to add on more. He mentioned something about addictions and suicide.

"For a year after I returned, I wandered around, not knowing or caring where I was."

He was silent again.

Judy asked him more questions and his answers were equally frank, enchanting and mysterious.

"Did you ever get married?" I asked him finally.

He looked at me silently for a few moments and then threw back his head and laughed. "I'm a mad man! Who would marry me?" And he stood there, laughing bitterly in the rain.

Part 5

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started. We were out near the bay of Bengal and in the distance were several small fishing boats, glorified canoes really. Each one had 14-15 people crammed onto them along with all the fishing gear. We approached one of them and motioned to them that we wanted to talk.

The fisher people looked at us warily but allowed us to approach. Kumar and ARmelia talked to them in Bengali for a while and translated for us. These were the fisher people who trek through the jungle daily for mud crabs and prawns. Each day, a few of them are taken by tigers. When they aren't taken by tigerse, they are dragged from their canoes by the giant salt water crocodiles. And when that doesn't happen, they are attacked by Bangladeshi pirates who steal the boats, their gear, and more sickeningly, their women and children. The men are either tossed over board or left in the jungle to meet their fate.

The women looked up at us with frightened, yet blank eyes. We offered to tow them back to their village and the entire way there, we watched tehm wrapping the mud crab's claws with plant stems and putting them into baskets.

We dropped them off and headed into the jungle again. We saw many beautiful storks and kingfishers and suddenly, the mangrove forests changed into palm and fern forests. Black shadows striped against their orange trunks. "This is the natural habitat of the tigers." Looking at hte black and orange, it was easy to see how tigers could rule here.

We sailed on. Every so often, we passed by shrines or red garlands hanging in the trees. After passing an area with four or five of them strung really closely, I asked what they were.

Armelia answered me. "Each one is a sign that here, a man has been injured or killed by a tiger."

I gulped. We'd passed by dozens. All relics of the honey-collectors who bravely venture into the forest each day to collect the delicious and famed sunderban honey. Honey I'd just drizzled on my toast that morning.

"Here, there is no one religion. All religions are the same. All people have to band together as one against nature. To survive."

Again, I felt that cold chill I'd felt on the watchtower the first day.

WE spent another night there and another day looking for tigers but finding none. I wasn't surprised. Tigers don't let themselves be seen unless they want to be seen. They can pick out a prey from the herd and stalk it for days. WE heard of how they pick out a human from a group and stalk it until at night, it goes into their tent and picks off that one individual.

As we left the jungle the next day, I wondered. If a tiger had been following us, which one would he have taken? We each had our weaknesses but how well did we hide them? If we weren't the predator, we would be the prey.

It was man against nautre and survival of the fittest.

Never before had that ever been more evident to me.

We left the jungle and went back to Calcutta but it was a quiet drive home. We've been a tame crew ever since.

We are now in a little unviersity town were we have been visiting vet shelters and hospitals again. There are giant fruit trees in our yard and an evil langur lives next door. I tried to make friends by giving her a buiscuit but she just bared her teeth at me and jumped away.

It's been surreal but I'm getting used to it.

Unfortunately, I am out of time here at hte internetr cafe and the monsoon rains will start soon again.

Signing off now.

Take care everyone and hope your summers are going well. Thanks for the e-mails and comments.

Gabe, if you don't e-mail me soon, you will be in BIG trouble.

As for the rest of you, your postcards will be in the mail soon I promise. Sort of hard to mail postcards from the middle of a tiger-infested jungle.

I miss home and all of you tons.

Namaste.