The Civet In Your Cupboard

The Civet In Your Cupboard

- Abhishek Narayanan

“Kitna bada bichhoo hai… How large is the scorpion and where was it last seen?” I asked the groggy hostel guard at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Woh doh foot ka bijju hai sir, aur uske teen bacche bhi hain,” he responded.

A half-a-metre scorpion with three young ones? Having lifted enough rocks to find scorpions beneath them, I was nonplussed. I looked helplessly down at the long forceps and small bag that I had brought with me, and at my colleague, a fellow rescuer with Wildlife SOS. “Did you hear ‘bijju’ or ‘bichhoo’?” he asked. Blaming a bad mobile connection, I said I had heard bichhoo (scorpion). I didn’t know at the time that bijju was the colloquial name of an animal that would continue to amaze me through the course of my wildlife career.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

The creature locally known as bijju or kabar bijju (grave digger) has many names, but one etymology is particularly interesting: ‘civet’, derived from the French ‘civette’, which goes back to the Arabic ‘zabad’, denoting the musky perfume that is derived from the scent glands of some civet species. The musk resembles an ingredient in the fragrance ‘Obsession for Men’ by Calvin Klein, civetone. The common palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, in fact derives its scientific name from the fact that both sexes have perineal scent glands that resemble testicles (hence ‘hermaphroditus’), though the sexes are in fact distinct.