Fifty, maybe a hundred satiated muggers bask toothily on the banks of a man-made pond, some with just their tail-tips in the water to thermoregulate, others lie in an immobile heap like a stack of giant logs. A few yards ahead, gharials and red-crowned roofed turtles mingle. And from behind a glass pane, a solitary Komodo dragon cocks its head curiously at us — “It’s much like a dog, extraordinarily intelligent,” I’m told later.
It’s just another morning at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and Centre for Herpetology, where I have come to meet its founder Romulus Whitaker. Except today, it’s not the somnambulous crocs that are drawing the crowds — there’s an audible hiss of activity at a little thatched corner of the park where we are headed. “Let me get my shades,” says Whitaker as we set out from his office. “I just had an eye operation. And besides, I look cooler this way,” he grins. We make our way through the eight-acre park that he and his former wife Zai set up over 40 years ago; Whitaker stops briefly at a crocodile pen to call out to a spectacled caiman that swims up most amiably.
The hiss turns into a transfixing din as we enter the enclosed courtyard at the Irula Snake Catchers’ Industrial Cooperative Society. Here, members of the Irula tribal community are offloading a bounty: wriggling masses of saw-scaled vipers, kraits, cobras and Russell’s vipers — the last being largely responsible for all the noise. “So these are the big four,” says Whitaker. Together, the four species claim close to 50,000 lives a year.
A bike and a boa
But the snakes that the Irulas have just deposited into earthen pots here will help save lives: almost all the snake antivenom serum made in India comes from venom extracted right here at the Society. Whitaker formed the Society in the 1970s to create incomes for the Irula community after the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, banned hunting, once part of their traditional livelihood.
These were the early days in Madras when Whitaker, ‘the snake park guy’, would ride around on his motorbike “with a sand boa settled in pretty nicely in my hair,” startling traffic cops.
A group of visitors takes pictures on their phones as the snakes sink their fangs into a Rexine-topped jar at the base of which is a rapidly rising volume of golden venom. The 74-year-old Snakeman of India, who was awarded the Padma Shri a week ago, will not be handling the reptiles today, not even for the camera. “I am slowing down in my old age, quite honestly,” says Whitaker. “Leaving stuff to other people to do.”
Here we meet Chandra, an Irula from Senji village in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur district. On her right index finger is a blister the size of a large grape from a Russell’s viper-bite three weeks ago. “ Vanakkam , how are you? How much antivenom did they give you?” Whitaker asks in part-English part-Tamil. Four vials, she tells him. Chandra is lucky, she got the right treatment at the right time. “People don’t understand the serious nature of a venomous snakebite. That wasting time on quack remedies — no matter how ‘famous’ — can be fatal,” he says.
While we have a rough estimate of deaths each year, “what has not been tabulated is permanent maiming. And this is tremendously high, probably several hundreds of thousands. They are generally bread winners, usually farmers, mostly men, out in the field doing their work — an important segment of rural population.” The real need is for rural clinicians and primary health centres to be trained and upgraded to deal with snakebite, says Whitaker. “It’s complex, but very doable.”
There is one other problem with antivenom in India that the herpetologist is now working to crack: because almost all of it is made from venom extracted from snakes caught in a single State — Tamil Nadu — it is just not potent enough when used in other parts of the country. “Venom from a viper caught in Maharashtra will be different from one in Kerala. Evolution and diet make them very different.”
Insects and other cool things
Whitaker has been travelling across the country to get permission to collect snakes as part of the Snakebite Mitigation Project. “We are not asking for very much. Maybe 20 snakes from each species from each State. But this would really help us create cleaner, more potent antivenom that causes fewer reactions.”
Whitaker tells me about the very first snakes he caught, as a five-year-old, near his home in upstate New York, where he grew up before his family moved to India. “This was a place where there were no venomous snakes. I would go around with my group of buddies turning over rocks and finding different kinds of insects and all sorts of cool things and that’s when I first found a snake. When I brought home the first snake, my mother said, ‘How fabulous, let’s keep it’. I was the ‘minister for the religion of snakes’ since I was a little kid. I was probably an obnoxious kid, forcing my opinion on adults, proselytising always.”
Snakes, he reckons, are all too misunderstood. “Most kids would be interested in snakes if it weren’t for their parents. It kind of bugs me that they can’t learn from an early age that, yes, there are some snakes that are venomous, sure, but the rest are fine. They are interesting, they are fascinating.”
For all his encounters with the reptilian world (which has left him with a “messed up” finger from a prairie snake bite during his stint as a medical lab technician with the U.S. Army 50 years ago), it was his brush with a mite that would prove most deadly. Seven years ago, Whitaker contracted scrub typhus, caused by a parasite transmitted by a species of mite, while on field work in Arunachal Pradesh; it landed him in hospital for a fortnight and temporarily erased all of his memory. “You know how you defrag your computer? It was like I had defragged my brain. It was gone. It was pretty amazing.”
It started as a headache — “a pretty intense one.” Whitaker thought it was cerebral malaria until he met a doctor in Chennai who diagnosed the condition. “He had seen 40 such cases, several of whom died.” Scrub typhus, which was a major cause of death and incapacitation among troops during WWII, has seen a resurgence over the past five to 10 years.
“My brain shut down, basically. I got acute cerebral meningitis. I remembered nothing. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t recognise anybody. I was in hospital for 15 days. To me now in retrospect, it is funny because I would keep asking Janaki (his wife, writer Janaki Lenin) the same questions every day. I didn’t know my mother was dead. I didn’t know the various rockstars I admired as a kid were dead. I even asked her who she was. I still have blank spots… What’s your name again?” he laughs.
Published - February 03, 2018 04:05 pm IST
