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Journalism of Courage
Let me begin with a confession: If I pick up a book with a blurb by Zeenat Aman that says, “This is one wild trip!”, I’m hooked. Romulus Whitaker’s new memoir, written in collaboration with Janaki Lenin, certainly takes us on a wild ride from the bucolic woodlands of upstate New York to the tidal pools of Juhu Beach, traversing the Palani Hills of Kodaikanal and the alligator-infested swamps of Florida, interspersed with treacherous voyages on rusty freighters crashing through forty-foot waves in the North Atlantic and motorcycle journeys heading both west and east, not to mention the mystical solitude of Arizona’s high deserts, where rattlesnakes sun themselves on the rocks.
The first volume of a planned trilogy on Whitaker’s lifelong obsession with reptiles, this book recounts his early years, up to his mid-20s. As the title, Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, suggests, it is a chronicle of an era too, from the 1950s through the 1960s, when 78 revolutions-per-minute records, free love and hallucinogenic substances helped ease the terrors of the Cold War and Vietnam.
This is also a story of migration, in which a young American boy travels to India at the age of eight. His mother, Doris Norden, escapes an abusive husband and remarries the ebullient, affectionate Rama Chattopadhyaya, who brings the family to Bombay (now Mumbai) where he sets up India’s first motion picture-processing lab and hobnobs with film stars. Though initially homesick, Romulus (nicknamed “Breezy”) quickly adapts to his adoptive homeland, particularly the diverse array of wild creatures that creep, crawl and fly along the margins of a rapidly expanding metropolis. He and his sisters, Gail and Nina, are quickly embraced by Rama’s family, particularly “Amma-Doodles” (as he calls Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, his new grandmother) with whom he shares a special bond.
A displaced American who grew up in India, Romulus confronts the many ambiguities and anxieties of a global identity. One of the book’s most troubling moments is when he and his sister Gail, both blonde and blue-eyed, take their half-brother Neel (born to Doris and Rama) swimming at the Breach Candy Club in Bombay. While they are welcome, Neel isn’t allowed entry because of his dark hair and brown skin. Later, when Romulus returns to the United States after graduating from high school, he writes of the “trepidation and uncertainty” of arriving at La Guardia airport in New York, where he blends into the crowd of White faces though he feels as if he “belonged to a breed apart”, adding, “The States may have been my country of birth but it was foreign. I was more Indian at heart than a Whitey. This cognitive dissonance has lasted all my life.” These feelings persist at other points in the story, especially when he confronts racism in America.
Be warned that this is not a book for the faint-hearted or for readers in search of tranquil platitudes about nature. A good deal of violence fills these pages, as Romulus arms himself with catapults, fireworks, pellet guns and an arsenal of even more lethal weapons. While birds and small mammals fall prey to this adolescent hunter-gatherer, the one family of creatures he doesn’t kill is snakes. Instead, Romulus is entranced by their lithe and limbless forms and catches sand boas, keelbacks and pythons with his bare hands, after which he moves on to handle highly venomous species like Russel’s vipers and cobras. Some are kept as pets while others are released back into the wild.
One of the fascinating aspects of this memoir is the way in which predatory human instincts lay the foundations for a career in wildlife conservation. India has a complicated history of hunter-conservationists and one could argue that the paradox inherent in that phrase raises a variety of ethical questions. Nevertheless, as we follow Romulus’s early adventures, it’s possible to trace a clear trajectory that leads from shooting and stuffing specimens to protecting and preserving wild animals and wild places.
Readers are cautioned that the book contains plenty of tobacco, sex, alcohol, adult themes and drugs. Though he doesn’t promote their use, Rom is open and candid about his first-hand experiences with marijuana, LSD, peyote and other mind-bending ingestibles.
Popular music from the fifties and sixties provides an accompanying soundtrack, from the sultry lyricism of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy and Joan Baez’s Silver Dagger to the pounding rhythms and wailing guitar riffs of Bill Haley and the Comet’s classic Rock Around the Clock and Frank Zappa’s album Freak Out. There is even a QR code that readers can follow to access this playlist, with a gallery of photographs to supplement the glossy inserts in the book.
Written in an easy-going, conversational tone, with a fast-paced medley of personal experiences, Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll is a vivid tell-all memoir that offers an intimate, irreverent self-portrait of one of India’s most eminent naturalists and conservationists.
Stephen Alter is a writer and most recently authored The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage
