Let me begin with a confession: If I choose up a ebook with a blurb by Zeenat Aman that claims, “This is one wild trip!”, I’m hooked. Romulus Whitaker’s new memoir, written in collaboration with Janaki Lenin, definitely takes us on a wild experience from the bucolic woodlands of upstate New York to the tidal swimming pools of Juhu Beach, traversing the Palani Hills of Kodaikanal and the alligator-infested swamps of Florida, interspersed with treacherous voyages on rusty freighters crashing by forty-foot waves within the North Atlantic and motorbike journeys heading each west and east, to not point out the paranormal solitude of Arizona’s excessive deserts, the place rattlesnakes solar themselves on the rocks.
The first quantity of a deliberate trilogy on Whitaker’s lifelong obsession with reptiles, this ebook recounts his early years, as much as his mid-20s. As the title, Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, suggests, it’s a chronicle of an period too, from the Fifties by the Sixties, when 78 revolutions-per-minute information, free love and hallucinogenic substances helped ease the terrors of the Cold War and Vietnam.
This can be a narrative of migration, by which a young American boy travels to India on the age of eight. His mom, Doris Norden, escapes an abusive husband and remarries the ebullient, affectionate Rama Chattopadhyaya, who brings the household to Bombay (now Mumbai) the place he units up India’s first movement picture-processing lab and hobnobs with movie stars. Though initially homesick, Romulus (nicknamed “Breezy”) rapidly adapts to his adoptive homeland, significantly the numerous array of untamed creatures that creep, crawl and fly alongside the margins of a quickly increasing metropolis. He and his sisters, Gail and Nina, are rapidly embraced by Rama’s household, significantly “Amma-Doodles” (as he calls Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, his new grandmother) with whom he shares a particular bond.
A displaced American who grew up in India, Romulus confronts the numerous ambiguities and anxieties of a worldwide id. One of the ebook’s most troubling moments is when he and his sister Gail, each blonde and blue-eyed, take their half-brother Neel (born to Doris and Rama) swimming on the Breach Candy Club in Bombay. While they’re welcome, Neel isn’t allowed entry due to his darkish hair and brown pores and skin. Later, when Romulus returns to the United States after graduating from highschool, he writes of the “trepidation and uncertainty” of arriving at La Guardia airport in New York, the place he blends into the group of White faces although he feels as if he “belonged to a breed apart”, including, “The States may have been my country of birth but it was foreign. I was more Indian at heart than a Whitey. This cognitive dissonance has lasted all my life.” These emotions persist at different factors within the story, particularly when he confronts racism in America.
Be warned that this isn’t a ebook for the faint-hearted or for readers in quest of tranquil platitudes about nature. A great deal of violence fills these pages, as Romulus arms himself with catapults, fireworks, pellet weapons and an arsenal of much more deadly weapons. While birds and small mammals fall prey to this adolescent hunter-gatherer, the one household of creatures he doesn’t kill is snakes. Instead, Romulus is entranced by their lithe and limbless kinds and catches sand boas, keelbacks and pythons together with his naked arms, after which he strikes on to deal with extremely venomous species like Russel’s vipers and cobras. Some are saved as pets whereas others are launched again into the wild.
One of the fascinating facets of this memoir is the best way by which predatory human instincts lay the foundations for a profession in wildlife conservation. India has an advanced historical past of hunter-conservationists and one may argue that the paradox inherent in that phrase raises quite a lot of moral questions. Nevertheless, as we comply with Romulus’s early adventures, it’s potential to hint a transparent trajectory that leads from taking pictures and stuffing specimens to defending and preserving wild animals and wild locations.
Readers are cautioned that the ebook comprises loads of tobacco, intercourse, alcohol, grownup themes and medicines. Though he doesn’t promote their use, Rom is open and candid about his first-hand experiences with marijuana, LSD, peyote and different mind-bending ingestibles.
Popular music from the fifties and sixties supplies an accompanying soundtrack, from the sultry lyricism of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy and Joan Baez’s Silver Dagger to the pounding rhythms and wailing guitar riffs of Bill Haley and the Comet’s traditional Rock Around the Clock and Frank Zappa’s album Freak Out. There is even a QR code that readers can comply with to access this playlist, with a gallery of images to complement the shiny inserts within the ebook.
Written in an easy-going, conversational tone, with a fast-paced medley of non-public experiences, Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll is a vivid tell-all memoir that gives an intimate, irreverent self-portrait of one in all India’s most outstanding naturalists and conservationists.
Stephen Alter is a author and most just lately authored The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage
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First uploaded on: 30-03-2024 at 10:00 IST
