Being My Father's Daughter

Being My Father's Daughter

- Harshini Jhala

It was 4:00 a.m. or earlier perhaps. Waking to a cup of hot milk, I found myself wrapped in a cozy bundle in my mother’s lap in the front seat of an open four-wheel drive Gypsy. My dad was in the driver’s seat and the cold desert wind slapped us in our faces, causing our eyes to water. I have vivid memories of a childhood spent in Kutchh – a dome- shaped piece of land in northwest India cut off from the rest of the mainland by the Little and the Great Rann of Kutchh. My father and his research team at the Wildlife Institute of India were studying the ecology of the endangered Indian wolf. First the car wound around what looked like a ghost village cloaked under the spell of timelessness. Even the feral dogs busy howling last night were nowhere around.

As we left the village behind I found myself wondering: “Was something caught! Or were last evening’s efforts futile?” We parked the vehicle a distance away from where a rubber-padded jaw trap, designed not to hurt an animal, had been laid from where my father surveyed the scene through his field glasses. There was something in that trap. We moved to the trap site quickly, but quietly, with my father insistent that no sudden movement be made that might cause any distress to the trapped animal.

“Anything but a village dog,” I said to myself, though we hoped it was a wolf hyaena, or jackal.

It was a wolf!

THE INDIAN WOLF