g.      Pets in the Mofussil

Up-country from Calcutta, where my father and thousands of other Anglo-Indians worked on the East Indian Railway, was known as the mofussil (rural area). Dhanbad, Jhajha, Burdwan , Lucknow and Dinapore were among the places my father was stationed. Jhajha was a railway colony and very definitely mofussil. So was Karmatar, where my grandfather Moore retired and where he built the Moore Homestead. Karmatar was not a railway town. In the mofussil the panorama of life was unlike that of the city. A group of mourners might walk past residences, chanting Hari Bol, Bol Hari ("Speak the name of God") as they followed a dead body on a litter on its way to cremation, or a wedding procession might go by with the bridegroom on a pony, rider and pony all dressed up in finery and preceded by loud drums. City roads were busy; mofussil roads could present unexpected pageants.

All sorts of vendors came to the front door. At his regular time the gawala (cowherd) with his small herd of cows came into the yard. A cow was milked under a watchful eye. When I was little more than an infant, I once wandered among the cows and was whacked on the nose by a cow's tail. My nose bled and I steered clear of cows for some time. A seller of chickens would come with six or seven of the birds, three of four in each hand, legs tied together. There would be bargaining: "You want too much for such skinny fowls. You haven't been feeding them gold, you know. In fact, you haven't been feeding them at all." And sometimes a man with performing monkeys would come by, or a man with a performing bear. But we had our own animals, for an interesting aspect of mofussil Anglo-Indian life was the pets. Villagers would sometimes come to the door with the young of wild animals, which they had trapped, or which had become separated from their mothers by accident: a fawn or a panther cub or a young monkey or a baby buffalo. My mother could not resist young animals and in the course of some years, she acquired at least one of every one of these animals at the door.

The fawn and the panther she acquired in Jhajha had little chance of survival. The fawn tried to eat a table cloth, which it pulled off a table. I do not know what happened to it. The panther was fed from a baby's bottle containing meat and liver juices. Against odds it survived. From being kitten-size it grew too large for a household pet and my mother reluctantly gave it to the Calcutta Zoo. The ride in a cage in the guard's van of the train scared the life out of it and at a crowded Howrah station, when it was let out of the cage, it made a dash for it and ran onto the platform. Bods scattered. Its handler managed to regain control of it. At the zoo my mother took the animal into a cage and tried to calm it. The next day she spent time with it again. The following day she left for home and did not return for three weeks. She was shown the animal's skin and told it had refused all food and had died from starvation. Terrible luck to lose two mothers, and a lesson not to take on wild animals without proper knowledge and proper facilities.

The monkey mother bought was also a Jhajha acquisition. She called it "Monkey Girl". It was with her about four years. When it escaped from a room or from its chain and took to the trees, it could be a devil of a business to get her down. Usually a banana or two or a hen's egg, patiently displayed, would lure her, but sometimes food was not a sufficient temptation. There was one sure way to entice Monkey Girl: rollout a bicycle. The monkey would be down in a jiffy and sit on the crossbar, hands on the handlebar.  One time I did not play fair: Monkey Girl came to the bike, which I could not ride because it had a flat tire. The monkey too had a sad ending. It started to bite people and had to be let go. It was taken to a railway station where there were monkeys of the same species and there released. The other monkeys at the station menaced the newcomer, who made for inhabited houses where the wild monkeys would not follow her. It was rumoured someone shot her, perhaps because of her belligerence.

Animals also came to my mother in Karmatar. A buffalo had been born while a herd of the animals was being taken through Karmatar to a neighbouring town. Perhaps the mother had died, or perhaps the new-born couldn't keep up with the herd. It became domesticated and would put its head through mother's bedroom window every morning and call for her. One winter it caught a cold and died. Mother thought the advice she had been given to bathe the animal everyday was mistaken and a bath had led to the chill. "Burwa" (the old one) was a bullock my mother adopted when he collapsed on the dirt road in front of her house in Karmatar. He was too old and too weak to continue in the yoke. He lived at our Homestead for about three years. At first he would walk down to the front fence along the road to watch his erstwhile companions at work, missing them. Then he realized he didn't ever have to work again and he gave up going to the fence altogether. Hindu friends of my mother praised her for her care of a cow. Burwa's life was not altogether dull: he found some mohwa fruit left out to dry and got drunk on it. Mother and the servants thought he would die, but the old fellow recovered and instead, died a natural death from old age.

The strangest of the animals my mother had was a camel. A Muslim friend, Ali Baksh, came with it to the Homestead in Karmatar and asked if the animal could live in the back compound as a special favour to him. Ali Baksh had seen the animal at a fair, where it was "crying great tears" and was extremely ill. He was moved to pity and bought the camel for the price of its hide and bones. The camel stayed about six months at the Homestead and became one of the sights of Karmatar, where camels did not naturally belong. People who came to view the camel, often in families, just walked through the Homestead gate and onto the property, friendly and unannounced. In keeping with the spirit of India, my mother never discouraged them and always had gentle words for the children. Baksh turned up one day and took his camel.

The last of mother's pets to be mentioned here was more unexpected than strange. It was a fowl. The bird was ulta par (feathers turned out) and looked as though it had had a short- haired, frizzy perm. It was being pecked to death by the other fowls in the hen enclosure. It was called "Moor", which was the noise it made in a cooing sort of way when mother coaxed it. She separated it from the other birds and Moor had a privileged space of her own for a run when it was not in mother's vicinity.

An Anglo-Indian ticket collector at the railway station in Jhajha named Jim Robbins had an unusual pet, which he kept in a room adjoining his office on the railway platform. The animal was a ratel, very like a badger in size and shape, with short powerful legs and strong jaws. The animal loved to get its front legs round an ankle. It seemed to get some sort of sexual gratification from doing so, for it could only be removed with considerable force. In the office was a chair with swivel-out legs, identified as a "Cawnpore fornicator" in Hobson-Jobson (British English-language in India). Indians casually visiting the office would be flattered by an invitation to put up their feet and rest their legs. When the occupant was in the recumbent position, the ratel would be let out. It would immediately fasten itself to an ankle on the swivel extension. Usually there was some petting of the animal, which became a desperate attempt to get free as it demonstrated a determination to not let go. At this point the ticket collector would remark that ratels had the bad reputation of entering the anus and getting at the bowels. The efforts to dislodge the animal would become frantic, with the occupant of the chair, encumbered by the reclining position it necessitated, using one hand to guard his bottom. And finally, in response to the victim's pleas, the ticket collector would peel the animal off, with many a chuckle.

Many Anglo-lndian households kept birds, mainly parrots and mynahs, but also smaller more colourful species like budgerigars, canaries, and "lal munias". When I received a daisy air gun as a young boy I had the beginner's luck to wing a crow. Its fellows and relations in the rookery created an awful din when I picked up the stunned bird. My thought was to make a pet of it and to that end tied a string round its leg, the other end of the string I attached to a pole. The wounded bird began to recover and in moving around slipped out of the string and flew into the trees, amid the ecstatic congratulations of the crow population. For some days after, that population flew over me with angry denunciations every time I came out of my house. The crows publicly embarrassed me and had their revenge.

Pets of mofussil Anglo-Indians was an aspect of the interesting life Anglo-Indians lived.