INDIA

passport, guide book, toothbrush and mozzie repellent...in case

So now I begin a NEW BLOG, as yet nameless, inviting you on an adventure to India, the country of my birth, drawn to it like a moth to a lamp. Time’s moving on and I feel now is my best chance to see if India’s is in my soul; its tastes, sounds and sights were after-all my first experiences. It’s time to get the truck moving, slowly at the beginning, gathering momentum. So here goes........

Jabs administered: Hep.A and Typhoid being the minimum requirement. I thought for 10 seconds about Rabies (3 doses at £450) Japanese Encephalitis (2 doses at £320) and Hep.B (3 doses at £90) and rejected them. Costs an arm and an arm (leg)! Anti-malarial stuff, I bought from Boots for £20, ready to begin a week before departure. I was advised by the nurse to consider having the jabs IN India where they are manufactured, at a fraction of the cost. I’ll be looking out for the dogs! (I’m boring myself already with the cost stuff; I promise no more from now on!)

Flight booked for 15^th March, from Birmingham to Mumbai via Paris, arriving 2355. I’ll  book a hotel though I plan not to spend any more time in Mumbai than can be helped. I thought I could be on a train heading for Udaipur, via Ahmedabad on the 16^th March. However, having researched the fiendishly complicated seating/sleeping arrangements on trains, I’ll have to sit down and think very carefully about this. Beginnings (like endings) are important when travelling, don’t you think? Perhaps I should spend a couple of nights in Mumbai and get things properly sorted?

We'll see....

He thinks he smells fox

He thinks he smells fox

Street lamps cast pools of light at intervals along the deserted road; the air still and cooling. A black figure makes its way towards the park, an area of open ground pitched into deeper darkness by the spilled light from the lamps. Keeping close to the wall avoiding the pools of light, it moves silently with a deliberate measured gait, loping cat-like, alert, dressed in black from head-to-toe. Upon reaching the park the figure melts into the dark, instantly accustomed to the gloom.
     A moonless cobalt-blue sky pierced by a myriad of diamond-white pin-pricks, broadcasts an eyrie light over the still landscape. The form of trees haunt the horizon, paths like sinuous streams curve and dip, cloaked in gun-metal grey, the grass a denser dark. The figure rests on his haunches in an ancient yew tree, its satellite stems like the fingers of an upturned hand offers a suitable lookout. The cold air condenses his breath and tightens his face. He pisses a splash on the base of the tree. Hunger gnaws at his belly. He’s learnt to starve himself before hunting to ensure his reflexes are sharp, his senses keen and his concentration unswerving. Slipping out from the cover of the yew, he sets off across the gentle undulating parkland in the direction of the farm where dogs begin barking.

'I shouldn’t be surprised if he turned into an animal; the time he spends with the dog,’ said his mother. ‘The two of them spend that much time together in his room and out walking in the park.’ She had just come downstairs from seeing her son to bed. She sighs deeply, disillusioned with motherhood.
    ‘You shouldn’t worry.  Company’s good for him. Who knows, he might turn out to work in animal welfare or be vet,’ said the father without looking up from his paper.
    ‘Do you not think it’s a bit weird, I mean he doesn’t seem to have any friends?’
    ‘Yeh but he’s only ten; we should be thankful he’s happy in his own company. When he’s older he’ll make friends alright, you’ll see.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ replied his mother clinging unconvincingly to her husband’s optimism.

It didn’t turn out that way. As he grew older the son became more reclusive. After the dog died he began to keep his bedroom door locked and the curtains closed in the day, open once darkness fell. He started going out at night alone. He painted his room dark blue, almost black. He was obsessed with animals, studying, reading stories, collecting cuttings from magazines and newspapers, researching on his lap-top and watching TV programmes. He left school at 16 and got a job at a private zoo near Salisbury. He cycled to work every day and with the physical work, his body developed fast, muscular and powerful.

The dogs stop barking as he approaches the farm along the overgrown bridleway; unusually, there are no signs or sitings of game; the land is deathly quiet. He thinks he smells fox. Lights are on in the farmhouse. He sniffs the cool night air and registers the familiar sharp sweet smell from the cowsheds reaching him on the gentle downwind breeze. There’s something else. Unseen above ground in the crux of an old oak his sensory faculties on full alert, he waits and watches. There’s something in the air tonight, something unfamiliar, dangerous. The dogs start barking again.

‘He’s become really strange, I mean kind of weird. He’s out there now. He’ll be out most of the night. I don’t even hear him come in,’ moaned his mother as she slowly to cleared the table; her pale face, gaunt eyes, her lank dull brown hair, casualties of constant worry. She added, ‘he seems scared all the time, always looking around as if expecting something to happen, nervous like.’
    ‘Oh for heaven’s sake woman pull yourself together!’ yelled his father unexpectedly, then realising his overreaction added, ‘don’t fret so much dear he’s probably got a girlfriend, or some mates somewhere. You know kids these days. He’s just growing up, that’s all. Trying to make sense of becoming a man.’ His mother retreated to the kitchen; his father stared blankly at space his wife vacated. It was one of those evenings.

Glowing orange light floods the small yard as the farmhouse door opens, revealing a silhouette of a man holding a gun. Darkness falls instantly the door shuts. The dogs hush at his call but he doesn’t release them. From the crux of the old oak, the hunter slides silently to the ground, pauses, then runs fast and low along a hedgerow at right angles to the farmhouse to where he has a good view of the pig pens and the chicken coups. Downwind in familiar territory. Settling himself against the trunk of a mature ash, he listens as the farmer makes his way as quietly as he can out of the yard towards the pens, to appear as expected to left of where the hunter watches.  A bat circles the tree several times then vanishes; the air is colder, he breathes slow and deep through his nose, feeding oxygen to his blood and listens in a state of high alert.

His mother pushed open the door to the living room with her bum, in her arms a clattering of cutlery, plates and mugs.
   ‘Felt like a thief going in his room,’ she said from behind her husband’s balding head as he watched the TV. ‘This lot is only two days worth.’ She nodded at the crocks wrapped in her arms, nestled at her breast. She staggered through to the kitchen and stacked the haul on the draining board.
    ‘This is the third night in a row he’s been out,’ she says and plonks herself in her chair.
    ‘Is it a bit of a mess up there?’ Her husband asks.
    ‘Well it’s hard to see. It seems tidy enough. There’s no bulb in the light, the curtains are always drawn and there’s only the tiny lights from his machines, computer and music things. They look like eyes watching you. It’s a bit creepy mind.’
    ‘Suppose it’d have to be tidy if it’s dark.’
    ‘When you get used to it, it’s not too bad. The leopard skin pattered bedspread he wanted for his birthday looks nice. But all those pictures, paper cuttings about sitings of wild animal, piles of magazines on the floor he uses as low tables. I won’t open his draws or his wardrobe. I feel the black computer screen and all those ‘eyes’ follow me around the room; I can’t wait to get out. Makes my skin crawl.’
    ‘I expect he’ll be thinking about moving out now he’s twenty, get a place in Salisbury maybe. We might just as well enjoy having him at home for the moment.’ Said his father without conviction.
    ‘Not much to enjoy,’ replied his mother taking up her knitting.
    ‘What’s that you’re making? It’s not another balaclava is it?’Asked his father flicking through the TV channels..

The farmer moves cautiously towards a long low barn, a dark bulk against the sky. He holds his gun lowered but in a state of readiness. The hunter watches mistrustful of the man, processing in his mind a myriad of signals reaching his senses. Something makes him suddenly alert, not a sound or a smell but something registered in a second sense. He stiffens, moves his head slowly to the left and stares into the darkness across a ditch to a small coppice. A shadow takes a form of something animate. Then he knows; he sees the form glide imperceptible to his right, a measured soundless slow motion. His heart races, his whole body stiffens. Two bright orbs, amber in colour like burning coals, radiant in the deep dark as the creature turns its head to look at him, inside him, through him. His brain runs into fast rewind searching for information: shape of the head indicates Cougar (Puma concolor) cryptid, unrecognised, unlikely in GB. North American Cougar, solitary hunter, adult female up to 90kg, not entirely black, mahogany dorsal strip...He senses the creature crouch preparing to pounce, the bright orbs unmoving while the body coils into a tight spring. In an instant the attack comes. The Cougar launches herself at him from across the ditch. He braces himself with no thought of retreat, stands tall in readiness for the impact, his whole body charged from a boiling cauldron of high excitement mixed with controlled fear.
   The last thing the hunter registers is the consecutive explosions from the farmer’s gun; the first missile enters the base of his skull as he stands up to contest the Cougar, killing him outright. The second pierces the top of his clavicle and spins him, corkscrew like as his body lurches to the left from the impact of the first shell. The farmer doesn’t see the wild animal vanishing in to the night.

‘It’s a sad situation,’ the farmer tells the TV crew as Bridge Farm is transformed into a circus of lights, vehicles, and manic high-viz activity. ‘It’s, I mean he’s, been prowling around here many a times recently.’
    ‘Have any of your stock have become victims of The Panther Man?’ asks the reporter pleased to have coined the epithet.
    ‘I lost a couple of lambs last week, heads bitten right off and bodies ripped to shreds.’
    ‘Do you know the man? I believe he’s local?’
    ‘No but I feel sorry for his family. Fancy having to live with a weirdo like that in your house. I expect his family’s relieved. I reckon I’ve done ‘em a favour, don’t you?’

In the weeks that follow, two farmers report attacks on livestock by an unidentified predator.