Death of a Baby

Yen

I went back home today with a heavy heart. A baby who had just learnt to walk, was encouraged by her mother to run. Mum was overjoyed seeing her little one hop a few feet. And there was her sibling, who joined in. Soon the three had devised a game of musical chairs. It was great fun as the two little ones hopped onto the little chairs of a kindergarten, hopping on to the farthest; toppling over a few, while mum, overjoyed at their prowess, did a few chair vaults herself. It was a large space left closed for the weekend. 

 Monday morning brought angry and distraught faces as the cleaning staff discovered the mayhem of toppled chairs and out of place tables. It surely was those ‘marapattis’, they cursed. Thank God there was no droppings or stink from urine. Out on the terrace play area, they looked up and saw the two young ones curled out on the tarpaulin overhead. The previous day the mother too was there. Today she must be exhausted and yet proud and comforted at seeing her two young babies so full of life and now fast asleep. 

I decided to let them remain undisturbed, but repair the space near the roof from where they had obviously entered the classroom. The job was contracted out to man Friday who would set it right the next day. 

Today was the day. However, there were no babies nor the mother on the tarpaulin. The classroom was undisturbed. They’d moved on I guessed. Anyway the hole near the roof was fixed, so they’d never enter the classroom again. The heart was tinged with sadness. 

Downstairs was a Playschool and Daycare centre. It was a standalone sheet roofed structure and for the past two months it was traumatic for the staff to open it each morning and be greeted by a pool and stench of urine. Soon it overwhelmed them. The space was abandoned and the entire Play school was shifted upstairs to this kindergarten space, till they could either catch the offender or close the spaces from where it was entering. It was the space between the false ceiling and the metal sheet roof, where tiny openings gave them entry. Soon they realized there was a mother and young too. They came at night and left in the morning, to, nobody knew where. It took a full month to fix the holes over several attempts and get the place sanitised and cleaned for use by toddlers again. 

A month had passed. The creatures had obviously been beaten back. The menace had been overcome. From nowhere the mother with two well grown babies returned, snoozing on the tarpaulin of the 1st floor school terrace. Nobody had seen them before, but it looked like the team that had caused mayhem downstairs, a month earlier. 

Wild Tales 

The Asian Palm civet, (scientific name : Paradoxurus Hermaphroditus) also known as toddy cats, (marapatti) are protected animals. Still, their nocturnal antics on the attics of old buildings of the Chief Minister or Governor have even forced the Kerala government to act. According to wildlife specialists, this nocturnal omnivore typically subsists on fruits and occasionally scavenges, and it poses little threat to humans. Small and harmless, they have been disconnected from the broken patches of forests, formerly their home. After straying into residential areas, they scurry about looking for new homes. 

These tree climbers seek refuge in air conditioning ducts, attics, and false ceilings as their natural habitats deteriorate. Across India, civets are seen with horror. Unsubstantiated wild tales about them are many. People see them as vicious carnivores with a dubious reputation for snatching away human babies. An ordinary common palm civet weighs only up to a maximum of 3.5 kg, making it impossible to carry a baby. Many people view them as bad omens. 

A fight for survival 

Apart from hunting rats and insects, these animals also help in dispersing seeds of the fruits and vegetables they eat. The brown palm civets, which can be found in the wild, excrete the world’s most expensive coffee beans, the ‘kopi luwak’. In Coorg, Karnataka, farmers manufacture expensive coffee using civets. In Kerala, the common Indian civet (veruku in Malayalam) is also facing a similar threat from urban dwellers. 

Due to its habitat destruction, this nocturnal mammal enters homes, apartment complexes, commercial buildings, and educational institutions in search of food. Come nighttime, they climb up the trees, jump onto the terraces and balconies stealthily, and forage for food. Forest officials who have rescued hundreds of toddy cats said that earlier, these creatures used to take shelter on the roofs of traditional houses in Kerala. With traditional houses paving the way for terraced buildings, the civets also shifted their shelters. 

Civets are solitary animals for the most part using a lot of scent-marking on the ground with the glands contained under their tails. They have sensitive noses that they can easily identify other civets by the scents they leave behind with these glands. 

 Their historical range has included the tropical rainforests of southern India, Sri Lanka, southern China, and other arboreal forest areas of Southeast Asia. They have been threatened by the bushmeat and pet trades, as well as being captured for the Kopi Luwak coffee trade, which uses coffee beans fermented in a palm civet’s digestive tract. Deforestation due to logging and clearing for palm oil plantations are also threats to this unique species. 

Known to live up to 15 years in the wild, the female chooses dark, quiet and hidden spaces, littering about two to four pups. Newborns are blind and tiny. The mother nurses them with her milk until they are about two months old, caring and protecting these helpless babies all by herself, in safe hidden spots like tree hollows, or roofs for about three months until the babies can climb and find food on their own. Males do not help in raising the young. 

It was late afternoon. The school was winding down for the day. Rat repellent was ordered online. The cleaning staff was back clearing up. 

“Good evening Sir. Aren't we lucky those marapattis are gone for good”, she said while deploying a broom. 

“Why, they could come back. It's just a day”, I said. 

“They won’t, The babies got caught as they descended to the ground. Those dogs. You know…” 

 A cold sharp pain brushed by me.

“Those poor kids, they didn’t make it”. 

I want to take comfort in knowing that mum brought her two toddlers to our kindergarten for a night of fun and games, and possibly crucial tuition for life on a hostile planet. 

She had concluded that we were the best bargain, for the two months of graduateship. They had probably left, descending for one last time for a life in the trees. 

Yen’s World School prides itself for standing on a pillar; one among the four, that calls itself “Nature”. It’s easy to draw up imagery, but difficult to practice. Here, fate gave us no chance to let our own kids learn from these wonderful creatures, fighting battles along their highly ancient lineage of cat-like carnivores, with its family tracking back over 30 million years. They knew more than us, adapted better than us and gave back to mother earth every single moment of their lives. We are relative toddlers to them; just 300000 years or 1 percent of their lifetimes. And we are giving nothing back except destroying everything, including ourselves every moment. 

A year before, another baby left us. A fledgling pigeon took off on her first flight, from her nest inside the internal stair loft and ran straight into our rotating ceiling fan. It crashed a few feet from us, bewildered but still alive. There were no visible injuries. Its eyes looked on in fear. I picked it up, caressed it and took it out to revive it and possibly help it fly. Within moments it closed its eyes and died in my palms. We laid the baby on a mat in the class and the entire school gathered in prayer. We sang for her soul and begged her for forgiveness. Later we buried her in a solemn ritual in the premises. 

Just today we netted the gaps from her home to our classrooms, so that babies in future would get a chance to graduate. The civet babies didn't. I weep along with the mother who fought off all the odds over the past few months and persisted in raising her young inside our premises. That she spent the last day, giving her babies a masterclass, embracing our very own tag line “Play - Do - Learn”, is a testimony from mother nature herself. 🫡 

Thank you dear Mum. Sorry my little ones. We bow to Mother Earth - Gaia. 

Bless us all. 

Yen

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Yen's World School

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