Nature's Spokesman

by M Krishnan

  When I took them out to sketch, they were patently alive still, to my surprise and pain. One of the dark ones got clean away, flying strongly, and one of the blue-white-and-black spangled ones fluttered up and was promptly caught by the ogrish gecko that shares my den with me. Quickly I tried to kill the remaining two again by pinching their thorax, and failing in this, painted them over their bodies with a powerful insecticide, containing 5 per cent DDT. Still they died slowly, to my mortification—evidently they were much tougher than the kinds I had collected for my friend.

  An obliging entomologist identified these butterflies for me and told me that they both belonged to the same Danaid family, and were very common—also that they were highly disagreeable to birds and lizards, probably on account of odour or taste or both (I think it must be some quality like odour or roughness that is perceptible even to inexperienced birds, though of course they may also taste nasty). I was told that both kinds are strong fliers and that their migratory flight was probably seasonal and influenced by atmospheric conditions.

  The dark kind is Euploea core core, and the blue-white-andblack kind is Danais melissa dravidarum.

  In a book kindly lent to me, I find that Aitken, writing with reference to Ratnagiri, says of Euploea core: ‘For the last ten years I have kept notes of the dates on which I observed the migration, and I find it ranges from the 1st to the 10th of June, and is always connected with the coming of the regular rain’; also ‘The natives say the rain will come three days after the butterflies.’

  I am happy to confirm those natives of Ratnagiri. I write this two days after the migration I watched, and the rains have just arrived here.

  1953

  19

  Argemone Mexicana

  Mr Thompson, the systematic botanist, stood beneath an enormous tree on the crest of the hill, panting and stiff from the climb. A withered brown flower fell at his feet, and he stared dully at it while he eased the rucksack off his back, for he was thinking of tea. Then, suddenly, Mr Thompson swooped down on the flower and held it up in trembling hands. ‘Malvaceae,’ he murmured gazing at the great boughs above him. ‘Yes, Malvaceae without a doubt. Some near relative of the Baobab, perhaps. But surely this glabrous calyx and these pentadelphous stamens—is it possible that this is—new genus!’ Suspense was insufferable. He raced down towards the solitary figure coming up the shoulder of the hill, fatigue and tea forgotten. ‘Say, tell me, my good man,’ said Mr Thompson, ‘what is that noble tree on top?’ The native shook his head and climbed on. ‘Yonder,’ shouted the urgent botanist, pointing, ‘on top of the hill.’ ‘Theriyathunga,’ replied the man (which is just polite Tamil for ignorance), and continued his way. And that was the origin of Theriyathunga thompsoni, a tree which does not exist, but there are hundreds of herbs and shrubs and trees with names no less ludicrous or grotesque.

  If the Latin names of our plants are often far-fetched and allusive, their common or garden names are equally misleading. The American Aloe is no aloe, the beautiful Eucharis Lily is not a lily at all, and neither Thorn- , nor Wood- , nor Custard-apple is an apple. It is refreshing to find a simple, straightforward name in the midst of all this whimsicality. Argemone mexicana, the Mexican Poppy, is one of these rare plants. It does come all the way from Mexico, and it is a poppy. Not that there is anything ‘sleep-flowerish’ about it. It is a businesslike, prickly weed, with shallow yellow flowers and whitish leaf veins, and the leaves and the stem and even the fruits are covered with small, sharp spines. The Mexican Poppy is one of the commonest plants of our wastes, where it flourishes in company with other exotic weeds. Often it is found in sole possession of a plot of barren, limey clay where even the Lantana has failed.

  Come rain come sun it flowers

  Blow east blow west it springs,

  It peoples towns and towers

  Above the courts of kings,

  And touch it and it stings.

  I am quoting a fastidious poet from memory, which is always a bad thing to do, and anyway he wrote of the nettle: but that was only because he never knew the Mexican Poppy.

  ‘The Mexican Poppy,’ says the industrious Pfleiderer, ‘is a well-known weed with prickly leaves and a yellow juice in all its parts. Oil for lamps is extracted from the seeds. The seeds are also used as a purgative.’ What he does not say is that these seeds are black and angular and very tiny, much smaller than mustard, and also very numerous. They are inside the dry, capsular fruit, and when the capsule is ripe it opens along predestined lines at the top, as in other poppies, and the microscopic seed is broadcast by the wind. No doubt these seeds contain an oil, which has other properties besides its purgative action, but each seed can contain only very little nourishment for the sprouting embryo in the form of oil. And no doubt only a small percentage of the seeds do grow into plants, but all this does not fully explain the omnipresence of the Mexican Poppy. This weed has the ability to thrive on very little, a certain native hardihood and a rank lack of sensibility, a quality which is difficult to put in words but which you may observe for yourself if you take the pains to meet any ‘self-made man’. That is why it is so numerous and so robust. During the rains, last year, I tried to grow my own vegetables, but nothing came of it. My tomato plants looked ill and had yellow leaves, and my peas were no better. I called in an expert, who announced that I had used the wrong kind of manure, had not supplied enough iron salts and had failed to allow for the calcareous nature of the subsoil. I followed his instructions carefully and prepared six new plots, with the results that I got two dozen small, orange tomatoes and three pods of pea. And a fortnight after I had given up vegetable gardening, rows upon rows of Mexican Poppies sprung up everywhere, both along the old, abandoned plots and the later ones, every plant bursting with health and greenness and the will to win. I doubt if anyone has ever raised finer beds of these weeds, and still, according to my expert, the soil was full of deficiencies and the subsoil all wrong. There is much to be said in favour of the less civilized life.

  1945

  20

  Lenin the Lizard

  Peeping from under a rafter in the ceiling, I see a pair of eyes—cold, beady eyes that search every nook and corner of the room for something to eat. And I know that Lenin, the fat and rascally lizard who patrols the walls of my room is out on his nightly rounds.

  Lenin has been there ever since I can remember. Once, long ago, he was small and lithe, and moved with a swift, easy grace. His tail would twist nervously from side to side, specially when some insect was near, for Lenin was eager and excitable in those days. His body would shine a warm, translucent orange in the glare of the wall lamp, as your fingers would if you closed them over the bulb of a powerful electric torch. At times he was almost beautiful.

  All that is gone. Tonight (for he comes out only at night) he is fat and repulsive. His tail is thick and rigid, with a kink at the end of it, and he is no longer translucent. I never liked Lenin, but in the old days, I used to admire his sinuous speed as he raced about the walls on his career of rapine and murder. Now he has no saving grace: he is just six inches of squat, warty ugliness.

  Lenin lives to eat. I have followed his career from the time he was three inches long. He has grown older and bigger, and more expert in the art of catching and eating insects, but he does nothing else. He is silent, and unsociable, resenting acquaintance except with moths. Lizards are not noted for their passionate and affectionate nature, but I feel that Lenin would be considered a sour old recluse even by these cold-blooded reptiles. Once, another lizard came into Lenin’s province—a much smaller, much younger lizard: a lizard whose delicately curved tail and elegance of carriage lent a vague feminine touch to the walls.

  For a moment I was distressed by a vision of Lenin, his wife, and a young family of Lenins crowding the walls of my room, but this passed like all visions. Lenin’s attitude towards the fair visitor was shockingly ungallant and cannibalistic. He chased her round and round, and only her youth and superior speed saved her fr
om a most unhappy end, for lizards are cannibals, and will eat their kith and kin if they are small enough to be eaten. Other lizards might indulge in friendships and family life, but not Lenin. I’m afraid he is a confirmed misogynist. He never gave up trying to eat her. That brave little lizard, she stuck it out for a week, defying Lenin. In fact she almost conquered the territory for, being quicker than Lenin, she either got the insects or drove them away before he could move. But it was a shortlived triumph. One night Lenin planned a cunning rear attack, and before she knew where she was, he had her firmly by the tail. There was a terrific struggle, and then down she fell, with a whack on to the floor, leaving a squirming tail in Lenin’s mouth. I was reminded of Tom O’Shanter’s mare and the devil:

  The Divil caught her by the rump.

  And left puir Maggie scarce a stump.

  It is a curious provision of Nature that the tail of a lizard, normally pliant, becomes quite brittle when anyone lays hold of it. ‘Aha!’ cries your inexperienced lizard-catcher as he grabs the tail of his victim, ‘I’ve got you at last!’ And the tail, suddenly fragile, comes away in his hand while the rest of the lizard scuttles hastily away to safer regions. And so ‘puir Maggie’ escaped. I never saw her again. Perhaps she went into hiding—into some dark and secluded corner—till she’d grown another tail, before venturing elegantly out again in the full splendour of a newgrown one. For it is an even more curious provision of Nature that lizards which have lost their tails grow new ones.

  Which brings us to the question, ‘Do lizards really need tails?’ Of course, they do—in fact I think that they’d be utterly lost without tails. The tail is the only organ of emotional expression that the lizard has. It compensates for his voicelessness. There are frogs that pipe shrill tunes and crickets that chirp quite half a dozen different notes, but everyone knows that the Lizard on the Wall never says anything beyond laconic ‘Tchut, Tchuts’. But then, he has, in the tail, an organ that expresses the entire gamut of a lizard’s emotions. Whenever he is excited by any feeling, he twitches his tail. It is true that very few things outside the imminence of food excite him, but that is truly beside the point. Watch a lizard as he stalks a moth and you’ll know what I mean. Only the tip of his tail twitches as he advances, carefully, inch by inch, upon his unsuspecting victim. The rest of him is tense and rigid—only the tail betrays his eagerness. Or again, watch him as he passes another lizard and note the gay, friendly wave of his tail as he salutes her. He has another use for his tail—a far more practical use. He clings to the sheer faces of the walls by the suckers in his pads and the tail is his rudder. Without it, his progress against the force of gravity, as he races along the wall, would be most erratic… .

  I have wandered far from Lenin. Lenin is so unemotional, and unsociable, that perhaps he doesn’t need a tail. Life, for him, is one continuous orgy. Beetles, moths and garden bugs are, to the zoologist, widely different things. But to Lenin they are the same: all things to be gobbled up. Once I saw him actually swallow a small scorpion, with no more fuss than a child would make over sugar candy! It’s during the monsoon that he is truly happy, for with the rain the insects come and cluster round the wall lamp. Just now, as I write, a moth has come in, and settled on a rafter just above the fatal lamp; one of those brown-and-yellow, mottled moths that look, when at rest, exactly like a chunk of wood. Indeed I can scarcely believe that it is not a piece of wood, but Lenin will not be deceived. However still that ill-fated moth may stay, however much it may imitate a chunk of wood, Lenin will get it; for Lenin eats everything that comes his way, chunks of wood included. Why, only the other day, he gobbled up a big, nickel four-anna bit I’d left carelessly behind on the table! You do not believe it? But I have the strongest circumstantial evidence to prove it. Only Lenin and my servant could have got at it; and my servant swears that he has never, in all his life, seen such a coin—it seems the poor, ignorant man simply did not know that the government of India struck nickel four-anna bits!

  1938

  21

  That Gentleman, the Toad

  Recently a man I know had what he termed ‘a surrealist experience’. Visiting a small town on business, he had returned late in the day to the rest house and was having a wash when he heard the strangest sounds from just outside the bathroom—deep, disconnected grunts and ‘basso profondo’ quaverings. Stepping out to see what was making the noise he saw some fifty huge frogs sitting in a circle on the cobbled courtyard behind the bathroom. Seeing him, they stopped their disjointed chorus, but did not budge an inch, and then, to his astonishment, they grew suddenly much bigger right in front of his eyes.

  Questioning him, I learnt that they were quite enormous, the size of coconuts, and dark brown in colour, with a close pattern of warts all over. On closer questioning he conceded that perhaps there were only twenty of them, and explained that, when he said coconuts, he had meant the small, hard-shelled coconuts which are stripped of their fibrous covering and given to departing guests at weddings in the South. No, he had not had the curiosity to stay and watch the amphibians, but had left the rest house soon after.

  Undoubtedly what he saw were toads, Bufo melanostictus, the commonest and largest toads of India. In places they do attain a quite impressive size, over six inches long and very stout in proportion. They are highly conservative creatures, seldom straying far from home except when the breeding urge takes them to watersides. They are nocturnal and crepuscular, retiring to some cloistered retreat during the heat and glare of the day, and coming out only in the cool of the evening.

  They are quite sociable, and numbers may spend the day together and come out in company at sunset, where there are convenient retreats, such as gutters or crevices between cobblestones, but I have not heard of their indulging in a chorus, like frogs. It is well known that when danger threatens them, they inflate their lungs and gain prodigiously in size, an instinctive action to impress and intimidate the enemy.

  I know this toad well, having shared my backyard with a huge specimen for years. It is one of the quietest and most unobstrusive creatures one can live with, and is definitely to be encouraged in any household for it preys on mosquitoes, flies, cockroaches and other household pests—I have seen a middlesized toad seize a large centipede and steadily swallow its squirming prey. Unlike frogs, which leap about and get in one’s way, it recognizes the right of way of humanity, and stays immobile in a corner, and when it has to move, it proceeds in a series of small hops with frequent halts, or slowly pulls its mass along in a creeping action, keeping close to the walls. To revert to the old-fashioned imputation of character to animals, the frog is an abounding bounder and the toad is a gentleman, portly, sedentary, unhurried in its movements, and never intrusive.

  Its ability to spot prey, when they are in cryptic situations is remarkable—evidently it has what ethologists term ‘searching images’ of its diverse prey. What that means is easily explained in terms of our own experience; the first time we are shown a picture of some creature in such an obliterative setting that it blends with its surroundings and can hardly be made out, like the picture of a stick insect on thin twigs, we have much difficulty in seeing it, but once perceived, it is instantly seen in subsequent sightings. The toad, apparently, has this ability to distinguish mosquitoes and flies against dark spotted walls, and prey in similar cryptic situations: it just creeps slowly, almost imperceptibly, closer, there is a lightning dart of the tongue, and the mosquito disappears.

  It is a long-lived creature, and I believe its lifespan may extend to well over thirty years, barring accidents. It is not preyed upon by most predators, for the numerous warts on its skin, set into a close pattern, secrete an irritant and repellant principle—predators that seize toads quickly learn to leave them alone.

  Is it possible that the toad’s habit of inflating itself at the sight of a potential enemy is not merely to gain impressive and intimidatory size, but an instinctive action that serves to express the repellant principle from its warts by the press
ure caused by the inflation of its lungs against its containing skin? I do not know but it seems likely—some specialist on the Anura might find it worth the while to investigate this line of inquiry.

  However that might be, the fact remains that its irritant skin does help the plump toad to survive. A Passage to India is now definitely dated, but perhaps some reader may recall the bit in it about the examinee who, asked to annotate the lines from Keats’s ode, ‘Thou wert not born for death, immortal bird. No hungry generations tread thee down’ wrote: ‘The nightingale is not an edible bird.’

  1982

  22

  The Dinky Desert Fox

  The dinky little desert fox (Vulpes vulpes griffithi) is only an arid zone variety of the well-known Reynard, the red fox with a wide distribution in many countries. It is about a quarter as large again as the diminutive plains fox of the peninsula (the Indian fox, Vulpes bengalensis), and much handsomer in coat and colour—its much longer ears, richly white furred on the inside and with the top half black on the outside, and the whitish tip to its luxuriant brush, are distinctive in telling it apart from the Indian fox, and although it is comparatively larger, it is quite small really, weighing only some 5 kg and being much smaller than a jackal in size.

  Depending on locality and seasons, its coat varies somewhat in thickness and colour, but even in March, when I saw it in Rajasthan near Ramdeora and at Makam and Doli, it was richly furred and its brush was very full, and though not red, it was distinctly rufous. In winter its pelt is at its richest, and thickest.