Not batty about bats!
The dreadful coronavirus, in a short period of its wild run, has the world on its knees. Everything has changed overnight. So far, all top world leaders, scientists, doctors and even know-all soothsayers look clueless before its fury. A new breed of management experts is talking ad infinitum of ‘rising curves’, ‘flattening curves’ etc. Doctors, like sorcerers, prepare all sorts of cocktails of medicines and tout them as great finds, only to be rejected the very next day. The old are said to be the worst hit. ‘The majority of the dead are old people,’ they console themselves, as if the old are easily expendable.
It’s so strange that the deadly virus is surmised to have been transmitted from bats — the shy, dark-loving and harmlessly frightening creatures. How one wishes that the Chinese had not disturbed them from their desolate, solitary habitats and brought them to their dining table.
The bats were part of our milieu as I grew up. The towns of yore used to have large green cover and plenty of vintage trees. Our family would sleep out in the open courtyard at night, as no air-conditioners and desert coolers were on the scene then. And no sooner the darkness descended than the bats in hordes would appear out of nowhere and swish past at fast speeds, charging up the dull, oppressive summer evenings. As I would panic, shriek and try to duck, my elder brother would calm me down, saying that they’re equipped with radars and echo-sensors and won’t ever collide into us.
Later in life, I got posted to a district and lived in a British-era, colonial-style sprawling bungalow, which had many old trees. The small-sized bumblebee bats would fly out of the crevices in the slate-roofed large verandahs to brighten up the sullen summer evenings, and I would find myself repeating the words of my brother to comfort and instill confidence in my two little daughters — who were mortally afraid of them. But one evening, a big flock of large bats perched on our venerated trees of pipal and shisham. Seeing them hanging upside down in the daytime was indeed a scary sight. My wife was perturbed. Our superstitious caretaker lost no time in declaring that it was an omen. Something had to be done. A farmer, who had a licensed gun, was called from the neighbouring village. At sunset, when it was time for the bats to wake up, he adroitly fired a couple of shots, but with such a loud boom that without any one of them getting hit, got the bats disturbed enough, scaring them to fly away elsewhere.
A decade and a half later, when we lived in the City Beautiful, two Le Corbusier-era mango trees adorned our house. As they got overladen with mangoes, a flock of large flying fruit bats would attack the trees at night, and within two weeks, the entire fruit was devoured, as we watched helplessly. The times had changed. I dared not use the gun.
