For more than three decades I was employed by a well-known tea company in Munnar that provided me spacious living quarters with a large garden attached. The garden was divided into two parts, one near the house for flowers and the other for vegetables. The flower garden had a small lawn and an abundance of colourful blooms surrounded by a hedge.
The vegetable garden was bordered by shrubbery and forest trees. It was graced with abundant plantains, banana, guava and peach trees, passion fruit creepers clinging to the guava trees along with a bounty of vegetables, whose seeds I sowed. Visitors envied my vegetable patch and remarked there was no need for me to purchase vegetables. But the reality was quite different.
The plantains would yield bunches of juicy fruit and as I waited patiently for them to ripen, I would count my chickens before they actually hatched! Early one morning my better half and I were rudely awakened by loud crunching noises and the sounds of trees being razed to the ground. We feared the worst, either an earthquake or even doomsday! Nervously we peered out of the kitchen window to see large shapes gorging on bananas—two huge pachyderms and a calf at their most destructive! I could not figure out how they knew it was time to honour us with a visit but whenever the plantains were due to ripen, this drama was reenacted. Old timers told me elephants have a very keen memory and sharp eyesight that help them track food.
The carrots, turnips, cabbages and beans fared no better—easy pickings for wild pigs and porcupines that preferred them to looking for roots and tubers in the wild. Sheer laziness and a fitting reward for all my backbreaking efforts!
The guavas, peaches and passion fruit were not spared either. Multitudes of birds and squirrels feasted on them. The squirrels had an uncanny knack of eating only the core of the passion fruit, leaving the outer shell hanging on the creeper. Thankfully, at times they left untouched a few fruit hanging near the ground, which I made use of when ripe. I relished passion fruit juice laced with sugar and milk. To my dismay, these fruits too vanished without a trace, making me vow to nab the culprits. I suspected my neighbour’s little scamps of pinching them. Well camouflaged and with a pair of binoculars, I spent hours hidden in the garden to catch the mischievous meddlers. At long last, one day I spotted with mounting excitement, a couple of dark brown shapes nibbling the fruit. Astonishingly, neither schoolboy nor domestic animal was the raider, it was a pair of barking deer standing on their hind legs and feasting on the fruit. What a rare and fascinating sight! I managed to capture the image on my mobile camera.
Though I lived there for more than a decade, the garden didn’t reward me with many fruits or vegetables. But the never-ending thrill of having gatecrashers from the wilds and observing them from very close quarters was unforgettable.