So I’ve already said that I’ve spent a fair amount of time in forests. I haven’t exactly been raised by wolves, but I’m comfortable being surrounded by trees that are probably poisonous and animals that definitely want me dead.
This was one of the many views from our rest-house
With that comes a whole new set of experiences, most of which made me almost have an embarrassing accident at an age where those types of accidents aren’t supposed to happen. Thinking back on them, however, I now find them amusing.
I can almost hear 5 years earlier me choking out my disbelief at referring to all those near death moments as anything but mortifying. And know that I am not exaggerating when I say near death. If you are in a forest in the middle of the night in a rickety old jeep that shakes in a breeze, there’s around 45% chance of you not getting out of the place alive. Fact.
There are a couple of incidents that I am never going to forget, so I thought, why not bore others about them? I do that all the time IRL, why should the internet be spared? So yeah. There you go.
*INSERT ANNOYING FEMALE NARRATOR’S VOICE*
The incident we are going to talk about today happened way back in 2010, when the writer of this blog was an itty-bitty baby in tenth grade. There were vacations for the Diwali festival, and instead of risk getting lung cancer because of all the cheap fireworks that everyone was having fun bursting all day long with nothing better to do, the writer’s family decided to go to the most happening place there was. A forest.
It gets around a 10000% times darker at night
As said writer’s father was in charge of the forest at the time, it was his sworn duty to go on nightly patrols in his ‘comfortable‘ ten year old jeep with torn ‘cushioning‘ and broken radio to check on the innocent, peacefully sleeping guards that had been positioned at intervals and roughly and mercilessly shake them to consciousness by dumping a bucket of wriggling, poisonous snakes on them. However, since snakes (specially the poisonous kind) were in short supply, the father had to make do with shaking the person awake instead.
Being of a naturally curious disposition, along with an insatiable thirst for wanting to show off to people afterwards, the writer pestered the father to be able to go with him. And because the writer’s sister was an unimaginative copycat, she also tagged along. The writer’s fearless mother was very much content to go to bed, but the thought of having to sit in the jeep with no one but their father and a driver for company for nearly 5 hours promised long hours of painful boredom, so the siblings dragged the poor lazy woman along as well.
After having being thoroughly amused at the disgruntled faces of the guards after being awoken and chuckling immaturely at the curses muttered under their breaths, the family was on their way back to the rest house quite soon. It wasn’t extremely late, just around 3 a.m., so the jeep’s occupants were excited with the possibility of seeing a tiger, or a leopard, or even a pack of hunting wolves, so their eyes were stuck to the tinted, dirty, cracked windows.
However, all they saw after a few minutes of driving was a female gaur, or, as they are mistakenly called far too many times for it to be funny, bison. After around a minute of observing the over-sized cow, the writer began to feel the familiar, irrational (until that night) fear of cattle beginning to sink in and started asking the driver to move on. But because the driver was a jerk who was having far too much fun laughing at the scared 15 year old in the backseat, he did not budge. And after another minute, a male gaur came onto the road.
Just chillin’
What had happened was, the poor, flimsy box of extremely weak metal had unknowingly been parked in the middle of two courting gaurs, neither of which were happy about the rude intrusion. Realizing this, the jeep made a move to drive away, only to be interrupted by a third gaur, also male, who had apparently misunderstood the situation and probably thought that there was an orgy planned that night, which the jeep was also a part of. However, to stop the shy jeep from leaving without having fun first, the poor, helpful animal planted itself right in the middle of the road, successfully blocking the jeep’s escape route.
Death cubed
Reverse was out of the question since the jeep stalled every time anyone put in that gear (it was a broken jeep alright), so the occupants of the jeep prepared themselves to be spectators of some live action animal porn. But the female apparently had second thoughts, as after a few moments grunting and pushing each other around, the female started to stare at the jeep. The first, bigger-than-the-jeep gaur probably thought he had some competition form the innocent, probably virgin automobile, and decided to challenge it to a staring contest.
Completely oblivious to his second (and favorite) child’s misery at being surrounded be three deaths, the father decided it was the perfect time to click a pixelated, blurred photo of the gaur threesome on this ancient phone (which, by the way, had a VGA camera). Without switching off the flash or the shutter sound.
It was akin to a gunshot in the silence of the cold forest night (in spite of the cold, there was not one person in the jeep that wasn’t perspiring). And the flash was blinding. The male bigger-than-the-jeep gaur was understandably upset at having his lover’s photo being clicked by some stranger in a metal box, so he bellowed out his displeasure. Loudly.
Finally, the father understood that he might be in some sort of danger from these overgrown buffaloes and decided to keep his ancient phone (if you could even call it that) inside. And as an added measure, he decided to check if the door on his side was properly closed. So he opened it, and slammed it shut. Loudly.
The writer, shedding all layers of bravado and toughness, curled up into mother’s side, whimpering pretty pathetically (not true plz).
Now you see cattle animals pawing at the ground in cartoons and think it’s funny all the time. It didn’t seem funny to the jeep dwellers at all. The bigger-than-the-jeep gaur had dug up a hole the size of a medium sized human head in the ground, and was probably preparing to fill it up soon. And at that instant, when the gaur was poised and ready to charge, the female decided she had had enough and disappeared into the trees with the third and obviously confused as-large-as-the-jeep gaur since BTTJ gaur was clearly more interested in proving his manliness.
Distraught over the betrayal of his lady-love-for-the-hour, BTTJ gaur also stomped away, snorting in disgust at the fickleness of females, vowing to never ever meet up with any of his future dates near a human frequented road.
The jeep dwellers heaved a sigh of relief, the father joking around and trying to appear completely unshaken by making fun of his second (and favorite) child who had been driven close to tears by the entire event (this is also not true).
After the driver had collected enough of his balls to start driving again, the occupants started to all relax but one, the writer would not rest till all the gaur in the world were as far away from them as possible. It would be something to dedicate their life for. It was a worthwhile, noble cause.
*END OF NARRATION*
So yeah, forests are beautiful, calm places, but they remind you on a regular basis about how puny humans with their loud, flimsy automobile barriers are only safe in their heads. If the gaur had been any angrier, we would not have escaped without a single scratch as we did.
Also, we did see a tiger that night afterwards. I might write about that too.
Hope you enjoyed reading about the time I nearly died because people around me don’t listen to my words of wisdom. 🙂
Note that only picture no. 1, 2 and the last one are ones I actually clicked, others are things I’ve stolen off the internet because we lost all our photos when we switched computers recently and id not have enough sense to back them up.
Figured I’d end with a pretty picture
humorworks 