Words + Images

In Steve’s own words:

We were there from 1957 to 1962. My father worked as a librarian for the U.S. State Department. I was five years old when we arrived and I could still speak Italian from his previous post in Genoa, Italy. I had great pets in India. My father had a dachshund. A long skinny regular sized dachshund not a miniature. He also had a Siamese cat that he had brought from Italy. In addition I had a young mongoose. His name was Mongi. My father purchased him from a snake charmer. I most remember how he used to run up the sleeve of my shirt. I first saw him when the snake charmer came to visit our bungalow. He took him out of a bag and put him on the ground. He ran up to the snake and sniffed. The snake had come out of the bushes around our place. I think it was a cobra. The mongoose ignored the snake for a bit and sniffed all of the hands and feets he could find before returning to the snake. The snake charmer held a bag open and the mongoose ran back inside. The snake charmer picked up the snake very carefully and placed the snake in a different bag. The snake charmer, who probably saw my face filled with delight, made my father an offer. In exchange for a 5 rupee note, maybe about a $1, my father bought me the mongoose.

Over time I had more than one mongoose though only one at a time. The first Mongi got too used to people and got too close to someone cutting grass with a sickle and was killed. The snake charmers visited the house once a week and they always had a mongoose for sale. I remember my father reading Kipling’s Riki Tiki Tavi to me. In the end I think I had two or three mongoose before we left India for the U.S. before embarking for Austria. They were all killed by the sickle because the men wielding the sickle sat in the grass looking very inviting and the mongoose would get too close. The last Mongi I had to leave  behind because he was not allowed to enter the U.S. I felt like he was being unfairly blamed for killing chickens when he’d never killed a chicken in his life.

They are about as big as a gray squirrel. Our Siamese cat liked to carry them around in its mouth and treated them like kittens. The dachshund also liked to pick them up and carry them around by the waist. The trio got along fine even when a new Mongi appeared. They liked to sleep together and with me. When the Ayah put me to bed, she covered my bed with mosquito netting. The mongoose would wait and unstuff the net where it was tucked underneath the mattress and slip into bed with me. We kept him fed fairly well with leftovers from the table and bits of chicken. They could come and go as they pleased in and out of the house and into any bedroom. My mother thought me and my father were nuts but she bore with it. The family gardeners liked them because they killed the snakes that the gardeners chanced upon.

My mother had a harder time dealing with the goats. They weren’t pets. They were more of a nuisance. We kept a few in the compound. They were kept for their meat and had free range to wander wherever liked. I rarely messed with them because they would butt fiercely with their heads. Sometimes they wandered into the house. They’d walk right through the screen door by butting the screen out. They usually made their way to the couch and fell asleep. I think they thought they were people.

The most common animal I saw in India were monkeys. There were several mango trees in the compound. The monkeys infested the trees. Rheesus monkeys. They made a chittering sound. They ate the mangoes and also threw them to the ground. I liked to climb the mango trees to pick mangoes and just eat them fresh. I still like the taste of fresh mangoes.