Our recce accomplished, Shama and I were on our way back to Bombay and just as the train started moving forward Rom pressed a porcupine-quill necklace into my hand. ‘Next June, then?’ I looked hesitantly at Shama. ‘Your sister is most welcome to come and live with us,’ said Rom gallantly, and we were off.
We were married in June 1974, an exercise fraught with uncertainty, including the small detail of whether Rom would turn up at all. Ninth June was the date we’d decided on, and soon after, he set off on a six-week gharial survey in Corbett National Park. As it turned out, the Registrar of Marriages was only available on the seventh, so Baba booked an appointment with him but was unable to contact Rom and tell him the change of date because we had no idea which part of Corbett he was camping in. Finally, he sent a telegram to Rom c/o every Forest Department office in the park, saying, ‘You getting married 7 June Bangalore stop You must repeat MUST get back in time.’ Life could be exciting in those pre-mobile days! Rom got back to Madras in good time to drive Doris, Neel and Nina to Bangalore for the big day. But this was the time of a major petrol crunch, and on that day gas stations were hoarding their wares in anticipation of a favourable price hike. The marriage party was delayed by over ten hours and arrived in Bangalore in the middle of the night, well after we’d given up hope.
After the short, simple wedding, Rom borrowed some money from his new father-in-law and we went off on a honeymoon, to Nilambur Valley in the foothills of the Nilgiris. It was a beautiful day; an early morning shower had left the foliage with a wet gleam that made the forest dance and twinkle. The tree trunks and branches of the massive rainforest trees were hung with mossy creepers, epiphytes and lichen. The persistent, pulsing sounds of the cicadas and crickets were like an orchestra of tiny harps and violins – ‘Here at last is the church organ,’ said Rom. We’d driven into a narrow mud road that ended half a mile in, where a huge Bombax had fallen across it. As we collected our gear, the drizzle changed to a downpour, as if on a sudden impulse. Drops of rain trickled down my back. ‘Can’t we wait until it stops?’ ‘It won’t, it rains here all the time during the monsoon,’ came the answer. Reluctantly, I eased myself out of the dripping vehicle and plodded down the track hung with knapsack, sleeping bag and water canisters.
We left our gear under a rock overhang and started upstream. Rom was especially keen on finding hump-nosed and Malabar pit vipers for the Snake Park and crawled on hands and knees under the overhanging clumps of ferns and bracken. Pit vipers are often coiled in the cool tangle of the undergrowth, waiting for a frog or lizard to come along. This slow creeping along gave me an entirely new perspective of the jungle. I’d grown up looking upwards, for birds, and now realized I’d missed one stratum of the forest altogether – the intricately meshed microhabitats and small details of jungle fabric on the forest floor.
Once we tuned in to our surroundings, we were amazed at just how plentiful these statuesque little snakes were in this small tract of evergreen forest. Malabar pit vipers are partial to the edges of steep hill streams, and although they often lie in the open, they are easy to miss. The smaller ones like to hang on low plants and bushes where they blend in very well. The larger ones, some 45 centimetres in length, have lichen-patterned backs and look more like roots than snakes when you first spot them. A year earlier, Natesan and Rom had found thirty-eight of these pit vipers in one morning on a stream near Nilambur, the location of which Rom kept secret. ‘It would easily be hunted out if someone suddenly got interested in pit vipers; let’s hope it survives the forest clearance and agricultural development in the hills.’
Also read: Romulus Whitaker’s colour blindness was an advantage. It helped him spot snakes easily
We found them on the forest floor, often on or near a rock or at the base of a big tree, just sitting there, perhaps patiently waiting for prey. Later, we saw one that had swallowed a frog and another that had a gecko inside it, probably a diurnal tree gecko. Ten years later, Rom drove a group of ‘herp’ people to Nilambur after the IUCN Snake Group meeting in Madras and, in a few hours, they saw a dozen pit vipers; it was gratifying to know that the pit viper population at Nilambur hadn’t suffered too much damage.
There are many species of pit vipers in the Western Ghats, the lower Himalayas and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; it is one of the most easily observed forest snakes and some are quite remarkable. The large-scaled, green pit viper is common in some hilly areas such as the Palani and Ashambu hills. Its large, plate-like overlapping scales give it a primitive look. Young pit vipers usually have a light-coloured tail tip, which they hold up and wriggle to lure frogs and lizards, which are then caught as they come forward to investigate.
This excerpt from Scaling Up: The revised, expanded edition
of the classic book Snakeman has been published with permission from Juggernaut Books.