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Thursday, November 02, 2017

Dr Durandham

Dr Durandhams day
Kerala is a land of elephants .
Most temples had one or many more and in its festivals most malayalees are used to seeing tame elephants at close qaurters .
I know of some whose hobby is just elephant watching
Even some teenagers
Wonder why they select elephants with so many other things to be watched at thier age !
Each to his own
of course .
There is an engineer hes in infosys now who had spent 3/4 of his blessed childhood gazing at elephants in temple festivals all over kerala .
He would reel away on every single detail on every single elephant mentioning them with so much endearance as in describing a neighbours child studying in a local kindergarden .
There were mishaps too in these festivals when the tame ones went berserk which wasnt a rare occurence
By nature scooting came easy to Mallus and at these times most would shimmer up the nearest coconut tree and cling to its fronds with the agility of a frisky monkey .
Watching an elephant in the wild is a bit different but from watching them in a temple .
As long as one was far away it was fun which is how I would describe the two elephants we saw near the Siruvani dam when we went there for a family picnic .
But enroute to the forest bungalow the road was a thin ribbon with menacing tall thick bushes of elephant grass which hid the dense forests on both sides and where no light entered and the darkness hid its mysteries well.
Its encountering an elephant in such a place that could land one in trouble with a big T.
My co brother Pramodh a senior airline executive is a committed wild life enthusiast and with his years of wandering in several core forests in India was considered as the familys Jim Corbett
Pramodh knew a lot on wild animals .
Unlike me who knew only about the human wild .
He told us that elephants like all wild animals avoided humans unless they are in their way or threatened them in some manner .
Clever of them should learn the trick of avoiding humans from them
Usually in narrow roads when we see an elephant while driving we need absolute silence ....said Pramodh
no horns
sit still
Then the elephant may find a path to get out of the area and it will .
but if it doesnt find a way out it may charge.
then and only then please run fast he would proclaim !!
That made me run away almost immediately !
to the amusement of my family who had nicknamed me Dr Durandham or Dr Tragedy as I was pretty adept in creating fertile scenarios
For example i would say
shortly a rogue elephant would see us and think of us as so many footballs
or how a huge Tiger would spot us just when it didnt have its breakfast for one week .
Every turn on the narrow ribbon of the road my Ayyos created collective palpitations in inhabitants of both the cars of our caravan .
I was strongly advised to keep myself occupied with human pleasures in the forest bungalow instead of venturing out to sport by popular demand .
Pramodh also continued his grim exercise of analysing dungs on the road peering at them with the air of an expert weather forecaster
at times stopping the car and once even tapping a particularly dry specimen one that looked like dung from a constipated baboon !
then declaring with the elan of declaring the magna carta itself as the dung was tiger refuse 8 days old with the air of a proctologist on his thousandth colonoscopy .
His machinations would produce sighs of admiration from the bated audience at his animal academic brilliance .
Wow how come pramodh you know so much !
Well if we keep tasting sorry testing dung all along the way like this we too would be experts but dead ones ,
Dr Durandham yours faithfully would pipe in to a not so cheering family .
And so we would meander along till we reached a particularly dark corner full of tall bushes and since we couldnt see much of the road ahead
Pramodh stopped the car and the one behind driven by my niece who by genetics had aqquired the genes of her wild dad iam sorry wildlife dad pramodh also stopped .
The eerie silence was broken only by a strange munching sound ahead and my silent gesticulation of it being prudent to go back was finally listened to .
Pramodh too signalled for the beating retreat .
To reverse a car in a narrow forest road no to reverse two cars in a narrow forest road with whatever was hiding behind those bushes ready to jump at any moment needed nerves of steel and minds of casted iron not that of bendable aluminium which me Dr Durandham posessed.
Father and daughter did that gracefully and in minutes we were gliding back to safety
For once Harietta your warning proved right Pramodh would say and others too agreed
And thus Dr Durandham had his day too .

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