Way back in the sixties, the children of Madras loved two places. One was the Marina beach and the other, the zoo. While we would visit the Marina once in a full moon, we would get a chance to go to the zoo only once in a blue moon. When I was eight, my father took me to the Madras Zoo for the first time. The zoo was then situated near the Central station behind Nehru Stadium. The zoo had huge trees; it looked as if the place was under a huge green canopy.
I still remember the order in which the animals were kept in their cages. The cages were designed to look like compartments of a circus train. The tickets cost just 50 paisa each and the first to greet us was the tiger—a beautiful animal from Bengal. The golden-yellow skin with dark stripes, his smouldering eyes, his formidable paws with curved claws, his whiskers and finally his mouth with those killer sabre teeth took my breath away. Then came the king of the forest. With golden mane and eyes of fire, the best of beasts walked up and down the cage regally and looked down on us as if we too were his subjects.
The cheetah had a small head and a lithe body with spots. I still cannot forget the sorrowful eyes of a chimpanzee as it stood holding the branch of a tree skeleton, with its long hairy arm, like an old prisoner serving a life sentence. The creature I fell in love with was the giraffe. He moved so gracefully, like a crane on greased wheels. A chain of cages housing birds stood separated from carnivores. Ducks were roaming freely following visitors for titbits to eat. The zoo also had a beautiful circular moat with lush green water. It was dotted with lilies and lotuses.
Those days when you travelled in a train from the Central station you could catch a glimpse of the animals at the zoo. Passengers could watch the zoo through the train’s window bars while animals could see the passengers from behind their cage bars. Had any of the tigers or lions escaped from their cells it would have been easy for them to flee civilisation by catching a train at the Central station as the lion, zebra, hippo and giraffe did in the movie Madagascar.
Recently I went to the Moore market. The Nehru Stadium stands there as it stood years ago. But I could not find any traces of the zoo. Disappearance of the places you loved as a child hurts you as much as the disappearance of people you loved. We should thank God for limiting our life spans to a mere 60 to 70 years. To live longer in a changing world would be unbearable.
M R Anand
Email: mr.m.r.anand@gmail.com