An Aural Journey through Nagarahole: The Seen and the Sawing

In our hunter gatherer days, sound helped us avoid predators. On a safari, it helps us find them. But just as the truancy of a sound doesn’t confirm the absence of its maker, the presence of a sound doesn’t vouchsafe the sight of it.

Presently, the continued bellows of the sambar in concert grip you in a state of peak anticipation. Your awareness is so heightened, you can hear every sound, feel every nerve. The cumulative effect is that of an intravenous injection of caffeine. Your heart revs like a twin-cylinder, four-valved engine running on 94-octane adrenaline.

Moments pass. By degrees a lantana bush some distance away parts, and something emerges. Your breath stalls momentarily. But it’s ‘only’ the sambar.

Tall, handsome and imposing but not overbearing, he casts a look of suspicion standing broadside in all glory, before making a dash across the narrow track to melt into the relative safety of the lantana wall over on the other side. Like a curtain that falls on a stage, the bush closes up back into place as the crunching of the dry leaves under the deer’s hooves recedes into inaudibility. The vehicle creaks as the naturalist props himself up in his seat for a better view and a harder listen. Seconds tick away against held breaths, burps and other necessary emissions. It’s so quiet that you start hearing the inner workings of your anatomy. Most notably, there is a fullness of the ears that occurs due to extreme silence, which is otherwise absent in cacophony, as you now realise for the first time in years. This being an alien feeling, you mentally reach for an auditory branch to hold on to; a grab handle of familiarity.

And it comes, with the advent of a stentorian voice, as though rising on the laws of Doppler, until it becomes a musical statute that surrounds you with unseen tweeters. Ti tee, ti tee, ti tee, ti tee, the song ascends pendulously, like in the Shepard tone, before sounding reconciliatory, with a conclusive and descending tee ri titititi.

But this is only an ominous intro, the overture. The chorus, which now begins on the tail of the preface, is a rapidly ascending series of short full-bodied assertions of a non-sanguine medical diagnosis. “Brain fever! Brain fever!” it hollers repeatedly in manic excitement to a crescendo, like Archimedes’s famous all-baring rush of “Eureka!” upon his bath-time discovery of buoyancy.

The vociferous customer in the jungles of Kabini, however, is no Greek scientist or physician, but the common hawk-cuckoo, a pint-sized predator more akin to a stage actor that sets Nature up at its theatrical best, by pressing the full array of effects into the service of its operations.

As a parent, however, it is far less dramatic and a lot more covert: it is what we call a blood parasite, laying its eggs in the nest of the nearest babbler, especially in April, which is thick in its breeding season, a time when it is also particularly clamorous. The hatchling may or may not evict the eggs of the host, and is reared to adulthood in complete innocence by the unsuspecting foster mother. The understudy of a busy rapper turns out in adulthood to be in actual fact a type of medical canary; a qualified virtuoso opera singer who ever cantillates the same diagnosis in notes of three, a family anomaly the nonplussed babbler-parent must attribute to the ever-capricious idiosyncrasies of adolescence.