The hallucinating cat and other animals

Funny thing, this aching need some people have to get high.

It's such an irrepressible urge; it has so much force and persistence that psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel has called it a "fourth drive", which functions much like our drives for food, sleep and sex.

Animals, apparently, have such a need too. And like humans – who will risk death and imprisonment to get intoxicated – animals too will go to great lengths to gain that pleasurable sense of well-being that only certain hallucinogenic plants offer.

In the Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan writes:

“According to Ronald K. Siegel, a pharmacologist who has studied intoxication in animals, it is common for animals deliberately to experiment with plant toxins; when an intoxicant is found, the animal will return to the source repeatedly, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Cattle will develop a taste for locoweed that can prove fatal; bighorn sheep will grind their teeth to useless nubs scraping a hallucinogenic lichen off ledge rock. . . Goats, who will try a little bit of anything, probably deserve credit for the discovery of coffee: Abyssinian herders in the tenth century observed their animals would become particularly frisky after nibbling the shrub’s bright red berries. Pigeons spacing out on cannabis seeds (a favorite food of many birds) may have tipped off the ancient Chinese (or Aryans of Scythians) to that plant’s special properties. Peruvian legend has it that the puma discovered quinine: Indians observed that sick cats were often restored to health after eating the bark of the cinchona tree. Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate.”

Birds do it. Bees do it and make honey that’s sweetly intoxicating. Certain elephants in Malay do it: travelling great distances to eat a vine that offers them a powerful kick. They will also trample on a palm that protects itself with long, tough thorns only to get at the intoxicating pith. Water buffaloes in opium country love to get drowsy on the cultivated opium poppies - though they are bitter and pungent to taste. Baboons love to eat datura. Cats love to hallucinate on catnip and go chasing phantom butterflies.

In places where khat, a powerful stimulant, is grown commercially, fields are protected by electric fencing to keep out goats who are mad about its leaves.

The fencing is a bit like prohibition in Gujarat. With a sign saying: Beware. Trespassers might die. In Goa, of course, there is no fencing. People get drunk all the time, even early in the morning. Maybe a little self-imposed fencing wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Rainmen

In the pouring rain, men and women draped in plastic are planting paddy. You see the bent figures in field after field as you drive past, snug in your car.

It looks like backbreaking work. Each figure, holding a bunch of seedlings (or should that be saplings?), puts one into the ground - and then another and another and another, never once straightening up during the process. In fields where the paddy has been planted you can see how neat the rows are, how perfectly aligned.

In the past, I have many a time gazed with pleasure at the tall straight blades waving in the fields around here. The green of the paddy is so bright and yet so extraordinarily soothing a colour that you can hardly bear to take your eyes off it.

I never once thought of it as food. Rice is something you buy in a shop, and it bears no resemblance to the paddy in the field.

Yet, to those who toil in the rain, standing in ankle-deep water, the relationship between their labour and the food they will eat is all too real. If they do not work now, if the rains are not sufficient, if the crop fails, then there will be no brown rice to eat for the entire year. Instead they will have to buy polished white rice in the market. And for a Goan who likes his fish curry and ukri (brown rice) that is a horror not to be contemplated. As a woman in the village once told me: Shop rice doesn’t agree with our digestion.

So paddy planters toiling in the rain - with their minds fixed firmly on the fish curry and rice they will eat - makes eminent sense. No work, no food.

But there is one other kind of person who must toil in pouring rain. You see him too, covered from head to foot in a raincoat, valiantly climbing ladders placed on electricity poles. It’s the poor linesman, an employee of the state-run electricity board. During the rains his workload trebles. He spends all his time fixing one broken line after another, day after day. And yet, we never see the fruits of his labour. No matter how much he works, the electricity supply still fails, again and again.

Darkness

Grey days continue, bleak and sunless. The sound of rain continues, almost without break: the battering on your red tiled roof and on window panes; the thundering cascades from the many furrows in the roof all around the house; the endless drip, drip, drip from trees.

All day and all night the wind moans and sighs and howls like some crazed Greek chorus, causing trees to dance wildly, scattering leaves as in some sacrifice.

The air is misty, as in a hill station.

One damp gloomy night, when the voltage is so low even the fridge stops running, all the lights flicker and die out. Through hazy sheets of rain you see a yellow light glowing dimly in the distance. It’s as you had feared. As a result of the downpour, carbon has formed on the wire connecting your home to the electricity pole. Yours is now the only house without electricity. Strangely enough, the fuse light on one power switchboard gives a ghostly red glow. You put the switch into the ON position and the light goes off. You would find this creepy if it hadn’t happened before. In the darkness you clamber onto a stool and switch off the mains in the fuse box to avoid the possibility of a fire.

You stumble through the dark house to call the electricity department. You unwrap the phone from its warm cocoon, but despite the blanket to keep it warm the phone will not work. You unplug it and take it into the kitchen. There, holding it a foot above the flame, you warm it gently over the gas fire. You try dialing again. This time the phone comes to life. But there is no hope for you tonight. The man at the other end of the line tells you to wait till the morning and to switch off the mains until then.

Your emergency lamp has run out of power. You have no candles, no torch.

Hopelessly you occupy the dark absolute void. After a while you think this is how it must feel for prisoners under torture in dark solitary confinement.

But why? - when darkness is a perfectly natural phenomenon. What is it that so unnerves us about being alone in endless darkness? Is it because we feel ourselves completely disconnected from that other outer world of reality? Is this the feeling of Absurdity described by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus?

In this brilliant essay (in which he examines the idea of Absurdity and attempts to answer what he calls the fundamental philosophical question: whether life is or is not worth living) Camus writes: "The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it. . . The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage-scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us."

Yet, even primitive man lived in awe and fear of darkness. And then he discovered fire! What a great triumph that must have been. At last he had some control over the many strange forces that dominated his existence. Let there be darkness - god declared. And man replied: I don’t think so. Not right now.

In The Bible According to Spike Milligan: "God said: Let there be light; and there was light, but Eastern Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected."

In this, Milligan speaks for all the state-controlled electricity boards in India. No matter how loudly the great god wanted light, the State did not will it. Let there be darkness in all the villages, the State said.

And the poor people had no choice but to tremble in this darkness like primitive man.

Marooned

Four days of steady rain and winds blowing at 65 km an hour. You look out the shuttered windows and all you see is sheets of rain and mist. In the garden the neem tree has fallen and the sankeshwar with its bright orange flowers is partially uprooted. Elsewhere coconut trees have fallen and casuarinas. Tiled roofs have broken. The electricity comes and goes, and then stays away a long time. The phone has a dial tone, but cannot connect with the outside world. On the advice of the phone guy, it lies like a baby wrapped warmly in a blanket to coax it back into life. The roof drips.

Everywhere is a great salty dampness. It seeps into all your possessions. A few books have mildew already. The wooden furniture is damp and mildewy. Wet clothes flap eternally in the veranda. The sugar in its plastic container is slowly becoming syrup. The glass shelf which holds it has a patina of moisture. You wait for the computer to conk.

You dare not step out of the house with something as ineffective as an umbrella. You try it a couple of times and find the umbrella turns itself inside out. You fear that like Mary Poppins you will simply fly away, holding onto the handle.

When the thunder of the rain beating down on your roof lessens, you can hear the thunder of the angry sea less than half a mile away.

Food supplies are low. You eat rice and dal and potatoes and homemade bread. And more potatoes and rice and bread. You dream of fresh fruit.

You dream of sunshine and golden beaches and blue seas.

You are stranded on a desert island in the monsoons.