Of crocs and snakes ...

Day One of my second tour with the French photojournalists brought me face to face,literally, with the reptilian world. Not really knowing how I could be of service to the crocodiles or to the film makers as a translator, I however set off one early morning to the Crocodile park on the outskirts of Chennai. On arrival I found that the crocodiles had made their introductions and were politely obliging to showing their scaly selves off to the visitors. Realizing that English seemed to be the comfortable mode of conversation between the team and the park's manager, I wandered around chatting with Gayathri, the Education Officer at the park. The disputed cousins of the dinosaurs lay around in their respective enclosures, sometimes so stone faced they could easily be mistaken for fakes. From the smallest to the largest, the longest to the almost extinct, they were all there. Gayathri explained that if one looked carefully at the crocs, one could identify some behavioral tendencies which included underwater mating and the dominant male showing off his pretentious self. As a finale to the visit, one float (is what you call a group of crocs) was treated to an extra feed, for which they came rushing up, clambering over each other, vying for a juicy piece of meat. Witnessing this, Jerome, our TV show host, seemed rather glad he could do this part of the series with the subject of his interest on the inner side of a cage.
As for the reptiles, they were patiently waiting for us in their respective pots at the venom extraction centre next door. There were all kinds..cobras black and white,vipers, kraits and so on. When the cameramen arrived they did their little shows, slithered around, hissed and spat. Things were going on quite smoothly until the idea of filming one of the volunteers came up. The lady had brought a few snakes bundled up in her little sack. So after preliminary explanations we let her do her part. Only that she decided to open the sack at the entrace of the centre itself instead of handing it over inside. Lo and behold, we were witness to a live display of the snakes practically let loose in the open. As much as I wanted to scoot, I was pulled further into the situation to translate our lady's words as she had launched into a description of how she had caught those slimy creatures. And so with snakes big and small slithering around at inches from my feet and others dangling by their tails in the hands of the volunteer, I interpreted her words or so I think. I suppose I heard myself breath again only when she finally bundled them all back up and we trooped in to safer territory to restart the session. All I hoped for finally was that she was good at counting and that there surely isn't a stray little snake or two slithering about waiting to scare away visitors as they arrived.