No Treetop Scolding

Ranjit Lal’s engaging new book will awaken the amateur naturalist in you, says JAI ARJUN SINGH

HUMAN SELF-ABSORPTION — our tendency to blind ourselves to the fascinating micro-worlds of other species — has been a constant source of angst for naturalist-writers and has sometimes produced literature that is too driven by a moralistic agenda to be really engaging. Which is why Ranjit Lal’s immensely charming Wild City: Nature Wonders Next Door — a collection of short pieces about the diversity of natural life that can be seen even in a crowded urban mess like Delhi — comes as a breath of fresh air. The fondness and attention to detail with which Lal writes about birds, animals and insects can stir the interest of even the most apathetic reader. At times, one has to wonder if he lives in an alternate Delhi the rest of us know little about: a city where it’s possible to attune one’s ears to hear the cry of a lone shikra above the sound of rush-hour traffic; to be constantly aware of the multiple ecosystems around us, even in the middle of our busy daily routines.

The defining quality of Wild City is the sense of wonder that runs through every page. Though Lal is especially interested in bird species, his affection extends to all sorts of life forms, from squirrels (whom he calls “treetop scolders”) to crocodiles, and even such creatures as the predatory spider wasp (which you might well find — along with the carcasses of its numerous victims — in the interiors of a dusty old music system). The writing is friendly and conversational: even in passages that detail nesting habits or evolutionary history, the prose is sprinkled with colourful analogies, so that the story becomes much more immediate than the zoology lesson it might otherwise have been. The squabbling of a gang of jungle babblers is likened to “an edition of The Big Fight gone out of control”; a praying mantis chomps on a honey bee “as if it were a bhutta” and cleans every barb on its own forearms as if it were “licking off curry trickles”. And the description of the perils faced by the male spider when he approaches the female for mating is typical of Lal’s knack for making anything accessible and fascinating:
“Many spider-women may be one hundred times larger than their men, and they are always bingeing, especially on husbands. When a male spider comes courting, he has to make sure he is the date and not the dinner, or at least ensure that he has a date before becoming the dinner. Some bring gifts — a freshly caught fly or cockroach, perhaps, nicely gift-wrapped…While she is busy unwrapping or consuming her ‘box of chocolates’, he sneaks up to her, does what he has to, and beats it.”

Though most of the pieces in this book deal with a particular species, there are also stand-alone chapters on, for instance, Delhi’s beautiful Ridge forest and the Budha Jayanti Park alongside it, or the historic Nicholson cemetery which used to sustain over 50 species of birds (“left to itself, a cemetery is a place where the dead look after the living”). In another perceptive essay — a rare one that moves outside the National Capital Region — Lal expresses his ambivalence about the artifice on display in Singapore’s Jurong Bird Park: “At 12 pm every day, a tropical thunderstorm is simulated in this aviary — but fear not, the walkway running around the aviary does not get showered, only the central ‘rainforest’ part of it does, so you remain dry and bored.”

This is also one of the very few times where he wears his concerns on his sleeve — as he did in a recent interview where he pointed out that as a people, Indians are not as interested in nature as they should be: “We have no idea how rich we are and how poor we are going to become.” It’s no surprise then that in a chapter titled ‘City Simians’, he admits that when he sees the rhesus macaques that have residing rights in nearly every city in the country, “I wonder whether we have evolved from them or they from us.”