Within the Rusty Gates of Eden
How a Wildlife Rescue Opened My Eyes to Nature's Fragility
Road cycling was about the one sport I enjoyed as a kid. It was a Sunday afternoon in Bangalore, and I stepped out with headphones on, for a ride around my neighborhood. Since it was a gated community, I seldom cycled outside the neighborhood, fearing the singular chaos of Bangalore’s traffic. I had barely been cycling for twenty minutes when a security guard waved me down. I was about to get off my bike and start having a proper fight with him. The security guards in my neighborhood were much too empowered. They were always one step away from asking to see your passport.
But this time, it was for something else. Seeing that I still had my headphones on, he pointed to a bench on the side of the road. On the arm-rest of the bench was a fairly regular-looking crow, tilting its head and looking towards us. I was confused. Did the man think this was some special kind of bird? If he did, I didn’t want to burst his bubble, so I smiled at him and nodded.
“No, no..” he said, “look, it can’t fly.”
The crow jumped off of the arm-rest and landed straight on its feet, flapping its wings in vain like a chicken. He cawed, and swiftly began to walk away from us. I parked my bike on the side of the road and followed him as he hopped on and on, frantically cawing. Perhaps he thought he was being chased. We finally reached a dilapidated cottage, and he went inside, attempting to hide from me. I had only ever been inside one of these huts once. They were scattered all over our neighborhood. They used to be servants’ quarters, where all the sweepers and maids that took care of the community, lived with their families. When I was five-years-old or so, there was a rainstorm. My mother and I had to take shelter in one of them until my dad brought the car over to pick us up. I remember looking around at the place with the rainwater having formed puddles here and there. The family that lived there was watching a singing show before we got there. It was still playing on the T.V., but they were all distracted by our presence. I still remember their smiling faces. They seemed excited to have guests over.
I went inside the hut, stepping over the foliage, and bricks that had caved in with the roof. The little crow stood in a corner, completely petrified. Now that I wasn’t following him anywhere, I didn’t quite know what to do. I looked at my watch and thought about going back home. I’m sure his mother is going to come for him, I thought to myself and began to leave. Then, I turned around to look at him just once before I left. There he stood, looking right at me. I had never before seen anyone look as helpless as he did in that moment. As I watched him resign into his fate, uncomfortable thoughts ran through my mind. How likely is it that his mother is “going to come” for him? If I just went home right now, what would happen to him? Would he stay here until he starved to death? The snakes would probably get to him before that. Or, he would step outside again and get hit by a car, trying to cross the road. I had seen dead birds lying on the road many times before. I’d see them from a distance and look away as I passed the corpse. That was going to be his fate. An ugly, unmoving object on the road that passers-by try to avoid. And yet, here he was now, right in front of me, alive and breathing.
I called my dad, half worried that he was going to tell me some version of what I first told myself: “Nature has its ways, let’s not interfere”, or something like that. He answered the phone and I could tell that he was having lunch. “What’s up?” I told him what had happened. When I was done, I heard him move the phone away from his ear and say something to my mom, who had to have been sitting across from him at the dining table. I then listened as my mom spoke, her words faint whispers from across the line.
“Okay, give me ten minutes, let me finish my lunch. Wait there and keep an eye on him.” said my dad. I was relieved.
***
As my dad stepped out of the car, I saw that there was a cardboard box in his hand with holes pierced through it. “I figured we’d need help so I called Sanjay. Let’s go see how our new friend is doing.” he said. Sanjay was a caretaker at one of the homes in our neighborhood. He was a hobbyist snake-catcher. What we loved about him was that, every time he caught a snake for us or anyone on our street, he’d call everyone outside to admire what was, in his eyes, God's work of art. “What a beautiful creature!” he’d say, holding the snake precariously with his bare hands, his eyes glittering like a child’s.
Sanjay showed up promptly and got off his motorcycle. “Good afternoon, sirs!” he said with his characteristic warm smile glowing under the layer of sweat that had formed on his face from wearing his helmet. When the three of us went inside the hut, we seemed to have startled the little crow. He was now flapping his wings and rapidly moving around the hut at ground level. The sound of his cawing inside such a small space was quite alarming. It made us feel like we were not supposed to be doing whatever this was. “Okay, easy, easy now…” said Sanjay as he slowly moved toward the now erratic crow. He caught it with too much ease. As he brought it over to us, in his usual style: bare hands and an overjoyed expression, I saw that the crow had his beak wide-open. It was like he had been caught mid-caw and was now just stuck in time. A truly disturbing sight.
We put him inside the cardboard box and started walking towards the car. “Why don’t you go and take your bicycle back home. Me and Sanjay will decide what to do with him.” said my dad. I wondered if there were any shelters that took in injured crows. In my mind, crows were at the absolute bottom of anyone’s priorities. What if we just got laughed out of every shelter we took him to? But that turned out not to be the case. We lived close to Bannerghatta National Park, which had a low-profile wildlife rescue center. Sanjay advised my dad to try taking the crow there.
First we took him home and waited for my mom and my younger brother to get ready. Everyone was excited about this brown cardboard box in the middle of the living room that was making sounds and shaking about. Our golden retriever had to be put in a room on the other side of the house where he couldn’t hear this intruder. Of course, he still did and refused to stop whining and barking. Once we all got in the car and started driving towards the rescue center, we put the box in between me and my brother in the back seat. After a while, the box got mostly still and silent. This worried us all. But, then the crow would occasionally flap his wings, letting us know he was alright. It was strangely comforting to hear his wings from inside the box.
When we finally arrived at the center, we didn’t quite realize that we had. It felt like we had just hit a dead end with an abandoned site in the middle of the woods, in front of us. Then, as we drove right up to the green gate that was ahead, we saw the sign BRRC - Bannerghatta Rescue and Rehabilitation Center. The gate was battered and asymmetrical. The green paint had come off in many places, revealing the dull brown color of rusted steel. We sat waiting for a couple of minutes before my dad honked, hoping someone would get the gate. It slowly creaked open, and a man wearing Khaki shorts and a white vest with a striped hand towel over his shoulder appeared from inside. Once he was done opening the gate, he motioned us to drive in. There was a three car parking lot where we parked our car and got out.
At first, I was quite underwhelmed by the place. It didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that I was expecting from a wildlife rescue center. It was hard to tell where the shelter ended and where the actual forest began. We were directed to the main building, which was just a cottage that was converted into an indoor facility. The first thing I noticed when I stepped inside was the smell: it reeked of animal feces. We were greeted by a serious man who was clearly the head of the facility. He asked me to place the cardboard box on a metal table - the sort that vets have - and once I did, he opened the box slowly. The crow did not try to fly out of the box. He sat inside shivering and looking at all our faces. One of the helpers stepped forward and handed the vet an injection. As he took the syringe towards the crow, it panicked and started flapping its wings, prompting me to look away. Behind me were small cages that had recovering pigeons and other urban birds. They all sat in their dark cages looking like they had grown numb from captivity. At the far end of all these cages, facing the window was a bigger one. There was a baby monkey sitting in it, looking outside. I walked closer to it, and noticed that one of its arms was missing. I took out my phone to take a picture of him. I had forgotten that the flash was on and the vet instructed me from across the room to put my phone away. “No photos allowed!”.
The monkey had heard me approach. It was now staring at me. The monkey did not have the playfulness and mischief in its demeanor that is so characteristic of the younger ones. There was a deep sorrow in its eyes that was heartbreaking. Outside the window, I saw big enclosures of hawks and eagles. All of them were crippled in one way or another. Some couldn’t fly, some couldn’t see. Others had their beaks chipped off.
I had mostly ever seen these creatures up close in wildlife documentaries and safaris. Out there, they majestically soar the skies and feel the breeze on their faces. What I was seeing now was a face of nature that I had never even thought about. Just as there is pure freedom and beauty in nature, there also is a cold and reckless cruelty. The animals that are weak are left behind and are utterly dependent on the mercy and good will of a handful of human beings. Documentaries rarely show us this element of nature though it is so central to its ways. I remember watching a show on Netflix about penguins. There was a shot which showed an entire colony of penguins rushing together across an arctic landscape. The camera didn’t pan even after all of them had moved out of the frame. A few seconds passed. Then, a solitary penguin limped past the frame, struggling to keep up. His feet were frozen. If one could capture a still photograph of natural selection, this was it.
My mom called out to me. The vet had offered to give us a tour of the shelter. We went outside and he told us all about those glorious birds that fall out of the sky and are brought here in terrible shape. I asked him about the baby monkey and what had happened to its arm. He had been run over by a car that was driving up to the jungle resort not far from the shelter. He had simply been pushed to the side of the road and it was only after a whole day that someone noticed him and called the shelter. Whoever had pushed him to the side probably didn’t even care to check if he was alive or not. Now, as I write this, I remember Yuval Noah Harari’s first line in his introduction to Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation Now: “Animals are the main victims of history”.
I felt something bump into my knees and looked down. There was a dog rubbing his head on my knees, asking to be petted. “Oh, that’s Chinni.” said the vet as I knelt down to pet the dog. “We’ve had her here for the longest time. Poor thing…can’t see or hear. She always knows when it's lunchtime though!” he joked.
As the vet later said goodbye to us in the parking lot, we all saw the quiet dignity in him that made his presence so sobering. For a kid raised on a staple of Marvel movies, heroism was often seen as a grand act of otherworldly strength, with the sound of applause and loud music that the hero disappears into. This day and the little crow that had led me to the shelter was like the world giving me a glimpse into what true heroism looked like. A real act of heroism does not have all the bombast and colors of comic book characters. Real heroes don’t shoot up and vanish into the sky; they stay, unnoticed, tending to lives broken beyond repair.
The vet had mentioned to us that he’d be happy if we could donate things he’d need to run the shelter. We decided to give the shelter a spare refrigerator from my dad’s office. A couple of days later, when we went there again to deliver the refrigerator, we checked to see how our little friend was doing. The crow had already begun to heal, boldly flying from one room to the next!
*****