Animal crackers

My father has a lot of stories about his baby (me) doing memorable stuff at various stages of her long and varied life. One such is all about zoos and the animals they were home to. Maybe his favourite tale set in that environment is when we were at the zoo in Prague, then Czechoslovakia, and his little girl came tearing up on fat little legs to him and Mum and yelled “Przewalski’s Pferde, Przewalski’s Pferde!” in her piercing treble. I had read about these horses in one of my books and was showing off with a child’s innocent enthusiasm. And my parents looked on with much pride, as much as they were embarrassed by my display of rather limited knowledge in every zoo we ever went to.

It all began during a visit to Athens when I was nine years old. After a strange (at that time, when my idea of gourmet was a Wimpy burger) but sumptuous breakfast of spanakopita (filo pastry layered with spinach and cheese), olives, bread and yoghurt, my father had gone off to whatever business he was about, leaving Mama and me to our own devices. Which were, in essence, wandering through the city museum and then finding our way to a family rendezvous. En route, we women had ducked into a bookshop that sold English novels, to find something to read and a crossword for my mother to zip her way through. That is where I met Gerald Durrell, in print, I add hastily. The book was about one of his adventures in Africa, when he met the Fon of Bafut and collected all sorts of beasts that bit, barked and bugged back into the forest at the slightest opportunity. It made me a Durrell fan for life, instilling in me strong and yet unsatisfied desires to visit the famous zoo in Jersey and work with endangered species. And it gave birth to a family passion for zoos and their denizens.

From there on, trolling zoos was not too big a step. We walked through miles of ‘natural’ habitat in Berlin, tramped our way over endless paths in Prague and gaped at rare creatures in Frankfurt’s landscaped enclosures. Perhaps most interesting were visits to England’s Longleat and Windsor, game parks created out of rolling estate grounds not too far away from London. At Longleat, after entering through a series of high-security gates, we were at one with nature, literally. Giraffes craned their necks to peer into the windows of our car, while monkeys leaped on the roof and tried to pull off the windscreen wipers. Much to our collective alarm, a lion, mercifully not too adult, hopped on to the bonnet of the vehicle and started languidly to pry off the rubber framing the window glass…with his scarily sharp teeth. A gentle toot of the horn – actually forbidden by park rules – distracted him and sent him in search of a more satisfying lunch. At Windsor, a vivid yellow-splashed penguin and I discovered our feelings for each other – I chased him to the edge of his home pond, at which stage he chased me back up the slope and then stood square in front of me and peed copiously in a high arc across the grass. With archetypal pre-teen modestly, I was giggling in shock when my parents discovered and then ruthlessly separated us, aborting our liaison almost before it began.

Much later, in graduate school in New York, I visited the Bronx zoo. Typically American in its efficiency and over-the-top display of meticulous planning and expensive execution, it was a fabulous experience to wander through the vast grounds, peeking into the private lives of various animals. There I met a panoply of beasts I had only read about until then, from the fat and healthy tigers to the orange-haired orang-utans, the lethal rattlesnakes to the woffly-nosed tapirs. At Denver zoo, I fell madly in love with a gorgeous miniature snowy owl, arctic white and big-eyed; we stared passionately at each other until my friends pulled me, protesting wildly, away from the glass-fronted cage. And in London, the pygmy hippos and I yawned widely at each other, the okapis showed off their enviously slim legs striped in black and white and the golden lion tamarins glittered metallic sparks from the branches they clung to.

In contrast, the zoo in my own city of Mumbai was a shock. While some animals looked healthy and happy, others crowded into spaces obviously too small for them, peeked fearfully through heavy iron bars at the people making rude noises calling them and cowered when someone from the crowd threw chana at them. I was dragged out of there, squeaking objections, before I could start a fight with the visitors and the zoo-keepers, protesting the conditions the creatures had to live in and the way they were treated. Some day, I hope, someone will provide enough money, sense and conscience for these animals to live the way they deserve. Until then, they will remain…err…animals, just like those who are responsible for their welfare.