Ever heard of Indirana sarojamma ? It’s a species of frog discovered in the Western Ghats in 2016 that gets its second name from an elderly lady who has worked in Zoo Outreach Organisation (ZOO) for more than 30 years. Sarojamma joined Sally Walker, ZOO’s founder who died in August, when the latter started Friends of Mysore Zoo in 1981. “My relative was working with her,” she recalls, “and brought me in to help.”
The Indirana Sarojamma or Sarojamma’s leaping frog
Sarojamma is hard of hearing; so our conversation is riddled with cross questions and crooked answers. Sanjay Molur, the Executive Director and Trustee of ZOO, researcher Priyanka Iyer, and ZOO volunteer Payal Bhojwani Molur try to help but only add to the confusion. Sarojamma looks happy when we dissolve into laughter and often interrupts to ask if we can please let her go so that she can get lunch ready.
She recalls Sally bringing tiger cubs home to look after. “I never went to the zoo, so I don’t know what happened there. She would bring the cubs home and house them in the bathroom. I would feed and clean them.” Priyanka interjects, “She speaks of looking after tiger cubs as if it were as normal as chopping veggies in the kitchen.”
Sanjay says that she has looked after other animals like otters, chimpanzees and birds too —“there were many animals that the zoo couldn’t look after so Sally would take them home” — but we are unable to get Sarojamma to hear us properly. Suddenly she says, “There was a photo of me with two cubs in my lap. I don’t know where it is now.”
When Sarojamma first joined Sally, amma as she calls her, her role was to cook and clean. Slowly, she began to take on other responsibilities — “looking after animals, collecting the books amma had ordered, sending out the mail...” — to the extent that she is now called “office mom”. Sanjay, Priyanka and Payal fall over themselves to talk about how she is the glue that holds the organisation together.
Though born and brought up in Mysore, Sarojamma happily moved to Coimbatore when Sally moved the organisation here. “She showed me around here,” she says wistfully. “And I adjusted. Initially she would send me home once a month but I wanted to come back because she was alone.”
Recalling Sally’s last days and her struggle with Alzheimer’s, her eyes well up and she wipes away tears. “It’s not fair what’s happened to her,” she trails off into silence.
As we wait for her to recover, I ask how old she is. “Around 75, Sally’s age,” says Sanjay but adds that it’s all speculation since Sarojamma does not know when she was born. “It was a complicated calculation,” he laughs. “Her oldest son is around 53 now. She had told us that she got married a couple of years after she hit puberty and he was born a year after that… very rough estimate there.”
By now Sarojamma has gathered herself, so I ask how she communicated with Sally. “She understood a little Tamil and I understood some English words. Also I knew her routine and how she wanted things,” she smiles. Sanjay laughs. “If Sally said that she didn’t want an omelette that day, Sarojamma understood the word ‘omelette’. So she would go ahead and make it.”
Despite having seven children, Sarojamma prefers to stay put with ZOO. “Her job profile is to take care of us,” says Priyanka fondly. “If we are sick, she’ll rustle up something, make sure that things are in their place, report us for not working properly…” And that’s why they named the frog after her; as a mark of their love for the old lady who keeps an eye on all of them.
When I ask Sarojamma about it, she nods in agreement. “I think of it as being with amma. Before she left, she told me to look after him,” she waves at Sanjay, “I am still doing that.”
And she walks away, complaining that no one would get any lunch if we didn’t stop talking to her.
