By Farouk Gulsara
“It is 5.23 am,” I told myself as I glanced at my watch. “I guess I got up early. Anyway, SK should be here right about now, right on the dot at 5.30am, as he has always been. Today is not going to be any different.”
I plugged on my earphones to hear the continuation of a podcast that I had been listening to from the previous week. It was a day before the full moon, but the cloudy skies and the lack of streetlights made the road look pretty dark. I sat on the raised stone fence as the auto-gate slowly closed from the inside.
Far behind a parked car, I could see a moving shadow. It looked like the silhouette of two stocky legs pacing haphazardly as if they were swaying. At once, I thought that it must be my neighbour’s son struggling to get back to his home after a long Saturday night out with the guys.
“Wow!” I was thinking as I symbolically patted myself on the back for keeping up with the routine all these years despite raging inner demons and concerned naysayers who keep advising me to slow down on account of being a half-centurion! “Only madmen would be running on a Sunday morning when the sane recovers from a stuporous night out!” they say.
Just as I was drowning in the nectar of my self-praise, I realised that the shadow cast under the car was not that of a man. The contour of two legs soon became four, and a greyish, horrendously ugly-looking face with a tinge of what appeared like thick whiskers soon manifested. I was 10 feet away, locking eyes with Vishnu’s third avatar, the Varaha, a wild boar!
Here I was, I thought, in the comfort of city living, enjoying the fruit of my lifelong struggle to benefit from the support of privacy and security of the gated community, I felt I had had it all. Within the luxury of economic independence and intellectual reasoning, the brutal combat of our ancient ancestors and the street smartness of the lesser beings have taken a back seat. Even in my wildest dream, I never envisaged a moment when I would have to face a wild beast!
It was the stare between two worlds; one of the modern domesticated kind who had a fight-or-flight response limited to his autonomic nervous system versus one who had to fight to stay alive and keep his place in the hierarchy of the pecking order of the jungle.
The stare looked like it lasted for an eternity. The boar, of course, hungry and desperate for food, did not want a competitor. As if he knew that I was not interested in his food, thank you very much. Negotiation naturally was out of the question, and so were all civil niceties.
I turned around to ring the bell to my house as I did not have the gate key. The sudden movement must have startled the beast. It gave a low-pitched snorting grunt as if it was showing its displeasure. Interesting, it was my neighbourhood, and the visitor or rather an intruder was displeased! Well, that is the law of the jungle. Might is right, and there is no place for logic. This is the ‘id’ that Freud asks us to put under check by societal pressures. It could manifest in a mob situation when enforcement crumbles.
Just when I thought that nay was near, me being gored by a wild beast, a beacon of hope came in the form of a beam of light from an SUV. My ride arrived right on the dot, just in time to turn the table on the aggressor. Awed by the approach – perhaps it thought the vehicle was a giant animal with a louder roar — its ‘fight’ mode downgraded to ‘flight’ as it turned its back to return to its own home. It retreated.
As we drove along, we saw a humbled pig strutting with its tail between its legs heading towards the secondary jungle. Probably my friend must have been reminded of the carefree days of his childhood when sauteed and spiced wild boar meat with toddy was a delicacy among friends.
That is why we are repeatedly advised by wise men to get back to nature. Nature gives a purpose to our existence. Its massive structures, like the trees, the mountains and elements of nature, awe us to the ground. It impresses upon us our deficiencies and our feebleness. It drills unto us that we are nothing, just a passer-by who makes a cursory appearance, while Mother Nature and the Universe continue into eternity. We are not even a single fragment of a tiny dot in the Milky Way, and even lesser in the ever-expanding dimensions of the Universe.
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Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, ‘Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy’ and ‘Real Lessons from Reel Life’, he writes regularly in his blog ‘Rifle Range Boy’.
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