Dear Chelonia
Discovering Bombay is like a cool game of chance. You go to far flung Versova in search of Prithvi Theatre and Manto/Chugtai, and you end up gazing at Juhu Beach and gorgeous trees. Prithvi and the play were wonderful, the lunch pretty amazing but the best surprise of all was the little roadside temple tank of terrapins. Watching them took me back to my early adolescence. Today was just the latest in a series of serendipitous associations with turtles, terrapins and tortoises.
Order Chelonia and I go a way back. First there were Victor and Hugo. A reptile enthusiast friend of mine gifted me a pair of these tiny terrapins, about thirty years ago when they were not yet on the endangered list. Since this same friend was given to transporting sick rat snakes hidden in Bata shoe boxes from the Snake Park to his home in the local bus, I suppose the terrapins were a carefully thought out gift.
We all fell in love with them. Our home at the time was a ground floor bungalow with a large, mostly unkempt garden, therefore worthy of exploration. At any point in time, these were part of the family: a house daschund, a house cat, garden cats, squirrel babies being tended to adulthood, a kite with a broken wing, and even a tiny baby bat. So the chelonian additions to the family were mostly welcomed by all.
I was a francophile in those days. Attending classes at L’ Alliance de Français as a 12 or 13 year old made me feel very à la mode and worldly. Perhaps we were reading Les Miserables…anyway, the terrapins were promptly christened Victor and Hugo.
Once the cats and dog had understood that these were not ambulatory snacks, all was well. The terrapins were no pushovers. They could snap hard and fast with their powerful little jaws and they did: at any cold black nose sniffing too close or at a paw reaching out to tip them over. They loved fruit. At first, we’d place a piece of watermelon or a grape in front of them but it would skitter away before they could get a firm grip on it. So then we learnt to place the piece of fruit in a corner where two walls met at an angle. They would mumble away at the fruit delightedly and then make their way back to the source of such delights, begging for more.
We converted an old aquarium into their home. A little sloping sandy beach at one end led to a pool of water at the other. Everything was going swimmingly until the day we discovered that Victor was, well, Victoria. She had laid a clutch of eggs and we found her sitting on them, looking bemused as only a terrapin can.
This was too many Chelonians for even my animal loving family to handle. With some regret and remorse, we donated the entire family to the Snake Park. I visited them for a while but they never again paid me much attention. My fanciful teenage heart worried that they were dealing with abandonment issues but apparently, Chelonians are not well known for sentiments and soft hearts.
My next encounter with Order Chelonia was on the beaches of Madras, where the female Olive Ridley turtle comes ashore to make her nest and deposit a clutch of eggs. Late night turtle walks were organised from Elliot’s Beach to collect the eggs and deliver them to a turtle hatchery at Neelankarai beach.
The female Olive Ridley is a beautiful reptile. About as large as a carrom board, she swims half way around the world in nesting season. She hauls herself laboriously out of the water at the same beach she was hatched on and makes her way up past the high tide line. There she and her fellow nesters begin to shovel the sand with their back flippers until a large, shallow depression is created. As the black tear like liquid runs from her eyes, she lays around eighty to a hundred eggs. She flips the sand back over them and flops her body down repeatedly to pack the sand in.
Then she ponderously makes her way back to the water. She pauses here for a moment, letting the waves wash her eyes and shell clean and then the next wave picks her up and she’s suddenly transformed into a creature of such grace and power. Her flippers cut into the water and she’s gone, heading out into deep ocean until the next breeding season calls her back to this home beach.
The eggs have to be quickly and carefully collected now before the feral dogs and other beach dwellers smell the delicacies. As nerdy teenagers, there was nothing more exciting than being out all night on the dark and lonely beaches, watching these great sea creatures, handing over the eggs at the hatchery, then sitting around with friends, flirting and teasing, waiting for the sunrise. I have a very special place in my heart for the Olive Ridleys and lonely beaches of the world.
So today, a tank full of terrapins in Juhu made my day. My friend told me about the many tanks that used to be found in Juhu, mostly attached to tiny temples. This was one of the last remaining ones. The ancient peepal trees planted at the edge of the little enclosure sent their branches sweeping down towards the tank. In it, I spotted an eel or two, and maybe two dozen terrapins. These were larger than Victor/Victoria and Hugo. Some sat on the stone steps, sunning themselves. Others swam and dove in the dark green water. A clutch of four or five passers by had stopped to watch them. We busy, hardbitten Mumbaikars are starved for these little interactions with nature. My Juhu friend says that at any time, there are always people stopping to gaze at this green haven. The scene reminded me of the lyrics of a song: This must be just like living in paradise, and I don’t wanna go home. Except, driving back to South Bombay later, I missed my turtle beach so much and I suddenly wanted to go back home to Madras.