Of Bandars and Bully Ants

Highlife In The Hutments - 3

This is a collection of short stories on life in the armed forces, collectively referred to as the ‘fauj’, and deals specifically with life in the fauji quarters. This story takes a look at the animal life that share our quarters.

Of Bandars and Bully Ants

            The Babe from Bandra and the Stunner from Santa Cruz squealed in unison, which made Cutie from Colaba drop her papers. When she bent down to pick them up she recoiled in horror and in a reflex action reached for the intercom. This was something the GM upstairs needed to know at once. “There are ants in the showroom Ma’am, big ones”, she managed to stammer out. The GM rolled her eyes upwards, and in as calm a voice as she could manage, advised the pride of Colaba to use a can of insect spray followed by a dose of room freshener. My better half related the latest crisis she had been compelled to deal with, amidst her negotiations with a demanding customer, during our evening walk. I listened silently, as one is expected to do when a superior officer speaks. Suddenly there flashed before my mind’s eye, a pulse generated no doubt by a long dormant neuron, a picture of a troop of bully ants marching determinedly towards my four year old toes, while I sat obligingly on the throne in an ancient bathroom of our house in far away Balasore. I stared at them transfixed as only a four year old could.

            As far as I could remember, there were always ants - red ants, white ants, black ants, blacker ants, ants as big as scorpions and scorpions as small as ants, that freely roamed each corner of every house that I can recall since childhood. They were there when the first British occupants entered those houses, while their descendants supervised the departure of the Brits to Blighty and their subsequent generations continue to live there, notwithstanding the annual efforts of the Station Health Organization. Insects of various shapes, sizes and colors, winged insects, creepies, crawlies and others have had a long association with fauji houses, many having actually accompanied the families on transfers throughout India. Thus we have had ants from Mumbai settling down in Delhi, roaches from Kochi hitting town in cosmopolitan Mumbai, Bangalore’s bully ants making their presence known in Gangtok and so on.

            It was not only insects but lizards, birds and animals of every description varying according to the place, that seemed to be attracted to those fauji houses and flats. Snakes in ground floor houses were a given, however in Goa I found myself peering at a snake through the window of our first floor bathroom, fortunately with a wire mesh in between. A friend even reported a snake on the fifth floor of their building when posted in Bombay, though I’m not sure how many pegs of rum had been consumed before the sighting, certainly several were downed immediately thereafter.

Wildlife was included free with the inventory of the house and indeed notes were exchanged between the new incumbents and the old occupants of a house, which went thus – “watch out for the snake that lives in the corner of the garden near the drain. Don’t leave the kitchen door open, otherwise the rats will enter and the snake behind them. Also watch out for a cat that lives nearby. It will enter through the window, if the milk is kept on the table. And yes, get the SHO to spray the house for roaches, particularly the bathroom drains …..”

The type of wildlife varied from place to place – in Delhi it was cheeky rhesus monkeys who used the clothesline as a swing and snarled daringly at the memsahib, but preferred to retreat a distance when the master of the house approached. In fact it peeved the missus no end that the bandars didn’t pay heed to her entreatments and even the swings of the mosquito rod held in her hands, but quickly moved off when I approached. No sense in raising that topic, however satisfying, during the evening walk, though.

But coming back, in Goa it was langurs, with snakes thrown in for free along with noisy mynahs, while in Kochi it was snakes, snails and flying cockroaches. In Mumbai, Delhi and other cities, one had to evict the pigeons and their extended families before one could move in. In Jamnagar, there was a veritable zoo, where jackals, deer and camels came calling every other day, along with more snakes and scorpions, while in Pune we were visited by a civet cat. Lizards were indeed part of the household and as my mother lived in dread of them and refused to enter a room unless the lizard was evicted dead or alive, I became an accomplished lizard hunter by the time I turned fifteen.

A friend who, on posting to Kolkata, was assigned a “pre-temporary” accommodation in Fort William, was startled one evening shortly after he had moved in, to find a spider nearly as big as his hand! When he related the episode of the gigantic spider, the next day in office, he learned that the room allotted to him was part of the stables dating back to the time of Col Robert Clive. Whether the spider also dated back to Clive will never be known, but he shifted out quickly, lest he next encounter the Colonel or one of his aides in one of the darker recesses of the dwelling.

Rats were another set of regular residents of our houses. Again there were a great variety of them – fearsome looking black rats that glared at you if you had the temerity to disturb them and smaller brown mice that were actually rather cute. The older the building, the bigger were the rodents. In Delhi, we lived in a ‘hostel’ on Maulana Azad Road, that had been built by my grandfather during the Second World War. The rats had obviously won their war for they seemed to have multiplied and grown bigger in size despite the rat-traps and the rat poison. Since that building had a false ceiling, one could hear them as they scampered around chasing each other. However in my experience the ultimate rats are the ones in Mumbai – I actually saw a tunnel made by rats through the floor of the ground floor flat that I was allotted on transfer from Goa. Rats that could dig their way through tiles?!

While visiting a cantonment near Guwahati, I saw evidence of a recent visit by elephants. My friend described the visit by the herd, who after sunning themselves on the lawn of his house, and having scooped up bushels of flowers as snacks, had merrily sauntered through carefully tended hedges, occasionally inserting a cheeky trunk through a carelessly left open window, to search for bananas and other fruit, all the while leaving large mounds of free gifts in their wake.

Bathrooms were a favorite place visited by snakes. In fact I once read a description of a bathroom written by an Englishman wherein he described the bathroom, or ‘gussalkhana’ as it was known then as “a room that had a tap at one end and a hole at the other. The hole was to let the water out and the snakes in.” We had one such gussalkhana in our house in Balasore, which had probably been built in the nineteenth century. I recall, as the afore-described three or four year old, being marched in by Mum for the gussal or whatever it was they called a bath back then, when I was just as unceremoniously yanked out and quickly perched atop a high chest of drawers while Mum deposited herself on a suitably elevated perch and proceeded to bring the house down.

A bit of shouting later, a posse of servants clattered past armed with mosquito rods and other weapons. A few more shouts ensued, till one of them emerged beaming with the offending reptile lying across his weapon of choice. The snake hunter would have held forth that evening, as the servants gathered for the post dinner hookah and beedi, in which he would have described the hunt in great detail. I know, because I often accompanied one of them to these discussions, where they rocked back and forth on their haunches while they discussed matters of importance.

Years later during a road trip, while staying the night at an Inspection Bungalow in Belgaum, my five year old daughter who had stepped into the toilet, let out a terrified shriek, for inside the toilet bowl was a fearsome looking black toad with an exotic orange strip running down its side. Once again the dreamer in me began to take over as I stared at it fascinated, however the shrieks of my progeny prevented me from any further wool gathering. Fortunately modern technology came to my rescue and I was able to simply flush it down.