We tend to feel safe in our walled and windowed houses. But the truth is, humans are consumed at night by several deadly creatures
Pascal the wolf boy. Pic/planetcustodian.com
It was 2 am when I felt pinpricks on my right middle finger. Light but very pointed and not painful, as though someone were holding a needle to the skin a moment before piercing. I was sleeping in a mud hut in the village of Kajulu, in Nyanza province, the heartland of Kenya's Luo tribe. Lake Victoria was just some kilometres away. I was on a personal mission to experience life in a place that had neither water nor electricity.
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I sat upright, groping for my torch. Whatever heavy thing was on my finger hung on tenaciously. I flicked the light on single-handedly — and saw there, hanging from my finger, a large rat about eight inches long, its beady eyes on me.
I whacked it with my torch and it let go, tumbling to the bed and scurrying away. I lay there eyes wide open, sleepless, nerves jangling. Half an hour later, as I was on the edge of dozing off, he came again. This time I felt him near me as his teeth tentatively fastened around my finger. This time he fled on his own as I sat up but I could not sleep the rest of the night.
The village pastor was blasé. "That's quite common here," he said. "Sometimes we will find that a rat has eaten a sleeping baby's foot or fingers while it slept. A hut is only a hut."
We tend to feel safe in our houses with their intruder alert systems and storm-proof windows even though the last nine months have taught us that houses are no match for intruders whose size is measured in nanometers. Coronavirus or any other disease-causing germ enters without your permission, hidden in your nose, breath, hands.
We take it as a given that we will not be consumed by a rat while we sleep. Or be dragged away by a leopard. Right?
It can come as a bit of a shock to realise that the vast majority of human beings, rich or poor, are bitten, sucked and chewed savagely while asleep. Even those in cloistered, air-conditioned homes are prey to the thousands of hungry mites and bedbugs dwelling in their mattresses, not to mention mosquitoes, fleas and other nocturnal critters.
To those without such comforts, sleeping in the open is neither invigorating nor adventurous. Of our many urban predators, wolves, hyenas and leopards are particularly fond of feasting off the exposed and vulnerable. Only three days ago in Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, five-year-old Shriya was dragged away by a leopard. Her body, half-eaten, was found later.
It's no fun being a hut-dweller near Uttar Pradesh's Terai jungle. The night is full of horrors, chief among them the wolf. According to legend, three animals — the wolf, the bear and the baboon — have a penchant for rearing human children as their own. You've surely heard the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, the wolf children of Italy.
We have had our own wolf children, stolen from their homes and parents as they slept but in a few lucky cases reared rather than devoured by their captors. India's legendary wolf children include Amala and Kamala, Dina Sanichar, Shamdeo the wolf boy, and in the 1970s, Pascal.
In 1974, I met Pascal, where he lived at one of Mother Teresa's homes. Pascal smelled us long before he saw us, and was the first child out at the gate, touching and sniffing us. His wrists were calloused and heels were raised off the ground, as you'd expect in someone who ran on all fours as a child. He was said to dismember chickens as a wolf would, starting at the soft part of their underbelly.
Most telling, he had a pattern of diagonal scars at each temple — exactly as though a mother wolf had carried him around by the skin of his temples, the way she carried her other pups. The missionaries kept his head covered with a red hoodie.
Although nothing as fearsome as a wolf or leopard had visited me in Kajulu, it was clear to me that I had to reach an arrangement with my rat. I had carried protein rations — peanuts, granola bars, biscuits and such. I left a plateful of munchies for the rat at the doorway from my second night onwards. He came again at exactly 2 am, and I heard him crunching my offerings. Then he left.
The rat and I made our peace but I was helpless against a smaller and deadlier marauder — Lake Victoria's gnat-sized mosquitoes. By the end of my 15th day, I was feeling mildly feverish, which had grown into the shaking shivers and high fever of acute malaria by the time I reached Bangkok. I was a hair away from meningitis.
After three days in the ICU, my fever broke, praise be to he on high. The doctors told me I would dance again.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper
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