Bungle and the Jungle

Bungle jook, bungle jook, bungle jook.

It’s like a mantra that repeats itself voicelessly. But who said this, when and where. I don’t quite know any more. All I know is that I was a child then. And Bungle Jook was a child’s rendering of Jungle Book.

Bungle Jook wakes up the long ago and makes my heart ache. Childhood and youth are gone. And jungles too.

These days, when I am not busy conflating nature with environment, then I am taking walks or going on bicycle rides around the man made lake, along man made tulip fields or the man made canal or in the man made polder, or the man made woods or the man made botanical gardens. All of these are available at a stone’s throw from my home, and I consider myself extremely fortunate that they are there. Not everyone on the planet can claim such a privilege. Jungle Book in 3D puts the sublime back on the agenda, if for a couple of hours only.

Then, in the days of Bungle Jook, eyes wide open against utter darkness, riding on a scooter, listening to sounds that emanated from the thick foliage, knowing that a herd of elephants was crossing the road ahead in their search for food from the fields of villagers, I felt the adrenalin flowing freely. Now as I listen to the wind in the trees in the darkness of the woods, my only fear is that a man may just be lying in wait for someone like me, and I try to connect to the breath that flows in and out of me to keep calm and carry on. Then, when the toilet was a mud hut, I almost squatted on a cobra in the process of digesting a frog, now I trip over puddles with the reflection of the clouds in them. Then, the leeches were picked off ankles, toes, legs and stomach, thick with the blood they had feasted on, now I feel the irritation of nettles on my skin. Then, when a million butterflies in myriad colours presented themselves on the blue catwalk in front of my nose, now the duck with the flashy green neck waddles across my path on her way to the water’s edge. Then, when the hundred-member cicada choir added to the feeling that I was slowly and surely being electrocuted as I sweated through each day, now I tell myself it will pass when a gust of wind slaps my face and threatens to fling me backwards.

Then in the time of Bungle Jook, I didn’t know, that many years later, I would be walking in a glass box in the botanical garden, my glasses misty from the moisture generated by a machine. A man, in uniform, would open a little cupboard, and take out one butterfly after another, to place each gently on the branch of flowering plants. I would peep into the cupboard to see eggs, larvae and pupae. In the mean time, the butterfly would fall off the branch. As if it has forgotten how to stand or fly. The man would pull up his trousers and place himself on the ledge to look for the butterfly, then he would pick it up and put it very carefully, back on the branch, holding on to the wings until he feels sure the butterfly has found its feet. He would tell me that the butterflies have come from Costa Rica.

They didn’t fly in. They were flow in, in the belly of another sort of bird.