Udaipur, a globally familiar city of Rajasthan is also called the City of Lakes. Surrounded by the Aravalis, the oldest mountain range of the world, the city encloses three lakes. In the days of my childhood, the lakes were choked with fish and other aquatic fauna like crocodiles and otters.

On the Christmas Eve of 1949, my father T. H. Tehsin along with his friends went for a duck shoot in the lake Pichola. Though quite young at that time, my elder brother Riaz and I accompanied my father. We went by boat and got down on an island in the lake. Three guns were posted at different points on this island. The boat was then sent in the shallows of the lake where there was a conflagration of birds. The birds were made to disperse and fly in our direction by shooting in the air. The man in the boat shot prematurely and all the birds flew away in the wrong direction, not in the direction of our island. All of us gathered in the middle of the island and started chatting. My father tried to call the boatman back but he was beyond the reach of our voices.

Meanwhile we spotted a group of otters in the water, nine in all. My father’s friends started insisting to shoot some of them. He refused as they were beyond the range of guns and he didn’t want to wound them unnecessarily. But on the insistence of two of his friends, he shot at one of the otters. The otter got wounded and started circling on its own position and moving away from the island. The other otters started diving and resurfacing while chirping loudly. They went away in the lake. My father scolded his friend for his foolishness and called the boat so as to put an end to the misery of the wounded otter.  

Till the time the boat could come, the chirping increased again. The other otters approached the island at a respectable distance as before, diving and coming on the surface again and again. But the wounded otter was not diving. It was just moving in circles. When they were close enough to it, the whole group dived simultaneously and started pushing it underwater in the direction from where they had come. After reaching 100 yards or so they resurfaced and started diving one by one to pull the wounded otter away. We kept seeing them till they vanished from sight. When the boat reached us, darkness had fell and we abandoned further search.

Recently I was going through the diaries of my father and came across this episode. It all came back to me as fresh as if it had happened just yesterday. Otters are known to be quite social and their strategy and dedication to rescue their wounded comrade definitely inspire deference. 

Originally Published in Forest Department’s bird fair magazine Souvenir in 2019