Who’s Afraid Of Whom?

Reflections on Fear, Wild Animals, and Everyday Encounters in India

The babblers arrived only recently around my home. They landed on the plumeria in my compound, and flew away when I moved merely a step toward them. The next day, one among them froze on a lower branch. I don’t know if it was fright that fixed the little bird there. I couldn’t help standing close and gazing at it, a babbler of the yellow-bill variety—one of the more common urban birds in India.

A few months have passed. I see the babblers a little after 5:00 in the morning these days, on the asphalt, poking short beaks into tiny crevices. It’s the time I’m doing my morning walk. They don’t scram when I’m upon them. Rather, they hop around my feet and throw me off balance. I’m afraid I might step on them.

This morning, a short distance from the babblers, there was a crow in a serene pose on the curb, looking straight ahead, its head and neck motionless. It wouldn’t move at my approach. I walked around it and looked back, and the thing stayed in a stiff contemplative pose. It had taken no note of me at all.

(I recall a post I published some time ago about how a tiny Munia bird, guarding chicks in her nest, once stood up to me.)

Then there are the dogs. Some folks pity them; some fear them; others worship them and give them a portion of the food they feed their kept dogs. Like all street dogs of India, they sit nonchalantly in the middle of the road. I clear my throat as I near them, so they know it’s me and won’t nip my ankle before they wise up to who walked into the pack of them in the dark. They’ve always let me pass, with a snigger, I’m sure, which I strain to hear but can’t. I don’t know if they do it at frequencies beyond us.

I’ve heard it said so many times that the only being the wild fears is man. The truth in that assertion eludes me.

After long years traveling in nations denoted as Asian tigers, talking to business tigers everywhere, not without envy, I withdrew into my shell and loafed about in “nature.” I went to a few national parks in India, and looked up tigers of the four-legged kind. They were different from the two-legged heroes in so many ways.

They were definitely not alpha. They lay about a great deal—sometimes half submerged in water, sometimes with cubs, sometimes just like that on sunlit dewy grass. When they walked, they moved with unhurried loping steps. And they didn’t care a hoot for the humans in topless trucks and safari cars gawking at them. They looked everywhere in a slow gaze but never once cast a look at the humans who had come from across the world to pay obeisance, bearing top-class cameras fitted with drainpipe-size lenses. The king went just about his thing. In fact, this king never cared to hold court. Ditto the queen.

Silence was the preferred language. And, in spite of that deep, delicious, majestic rumble of a voice, the roar was rarely done during those wildlife encounters.

But I almost forgot. There are a couple of animals that have shown me fear. One is Luca. I was meditating one day in vajrasana when he trotted in and went into a tizzy, thinking the master had died. He barked and barked and licked me out of my source. The other is Duke, to whom I gave a sharp rebuke when he once fell upon Luca. Duke is a lean Cane Corso, 85 kilograms. Luca is an overweight Beagle, 18 kilograms.

That’s life as I’ve been living it. Not with bowed head, but ever on my toes.