Salon 175 at the Bengal Club rocked to the enthusiastic voices of 35 Bengal Club Book Club participants on Tuesday, April 25, on the occasion of Earth Day month celebrations. This was a very special exploration which intersected literature, reel life and real life.
The event, conceptualised and anchored by Book Club curator Julie Mehta celebrated two books: In the Shadow of the Leaves by club member Anjana Basu, and An Elsewhere Place by another Bengal Club member Malay Kumar Roy, as well as a hot-off-the-press title 76, Garden Reach by Lata Bajoria, who spoke eloquently about the pressing need to create green spaces in our urban jungles and her belief that the planet belongs to all species and needs to be shared.
Critical reader Anju Munshi highlighted the importance of Anjana Basu’s unique approach in her story for young adults on the tiger, by looking at humans from the tiger’s point of view. She also explored the story of Malay Roy’s growing up in Hazaribagh and meeting leopards, bears and the kind and courageous folk who lived in and around the jungles, and how these boyhood encounters had an abiding effect on him.
Anasuya Pal brought her rich and varied experiences while resident in South Africa to bear upon a compelling analysis of the classic story of Elsa the lioness, Born Free by Joy Adamson, and alerted the audience to the effects of colonialism on conservation of animals in once colonised nations.
Master’s in English scholar Anushka Hazra invoked Gerald Durrell to drive home the transformative effect of having read My Family and Other Animals: “I can now share a space with a house lizard and understand how important it is to practice biodiversity in our own lives. Literature goes a long way to help us see how we can contribute to saving the planet when we ‘live’ the stories the writers are writing about.”
At the hybrid event participants from over puddles and ponds from Bangalore to Hyderabad and Florida and the UK shared their stories about encounters with wild things from leopard encounters, maulings and unexpected trysts with snakes, elephants and birds that resonated with everyone in Lord Macaulay’s old residence.
The evening buzzed with excitement as Florida University’s Jeanne Carol Ewert spoke about a snake she was handling in her backyard, a regular visitor to eat eggs in her chicken coop. Birders Surajit and Rupasree Datta Chowdhury got the audience up to speed on how serious Indian wildlife enthusiasts have become about bird-watching not just in India, but all over the planet.
Paramita Mukherjee Mullick, Viveck Krishna, Rohinton Babaycon, Saheli Mitra, Somnath Sinha and Sangeeta Kichlu regaled with stories of encounters with the wild. Vinod Pillai narrated his encounter with a bird when he was a youth, and how the inadvertent killing of that beautiful bird left a lifelong sadness within him.
Tea estate veteran Rohinton Babaycon described a really close encounter with a leopard that leaped into his living room at his bungalow in the tea garden, whom he chased off by yelling.
Harish Mehta, who grew up in a large, wooded bungalow in Lucknow cantonment recalled living alongside cobras and smaller snakes, visiting monkeys and lemurs, a lemur befriending the family dog, Krupa, a sheepdog from Bhutan, and in the evenings long formations of geese flying overhead in an arrowhead. “Living with backyard creatures makes you appreciate the need to preserve nature,” he says. In his home in Mississauga, Canada, he befriended cardinals, chickadees and goldfinches, whistling to them, speaking their language, and they spoke back to his call to come and feast.
The most endearing and touching story was Manoj Mohanka’s. He said “This is truly my father’s story, about a leopard cub that he found one night on the highway in the Hazaribagh precinct several decades ago”. As he held up the photograph of his father and Ruby, the leopard, who was the constant companion of his father, the audience was left spellbound.
The evening ended with Urmi Sinha relating a real-life brush with a different kind of wild thing — a hungry ghost who visited her ancestral home when she was a child.
(l-r)Manoj Mohanka shows the photograph of his father with the leopard that he had befriended, Jeanne Carol Ewert of Florida with a snake that regularly visited her home
