It was nearly 4 p.m. by the time we reached Bonobihari Babu’s house. It was impossible to tell from outside that the house contained a mini zoo. The animals were all kept in the back garden. ‘This house was built about thirty years before the Mutiny by a wealthy Muslim merchant,’ Bonobihari Babu told us. ‘I bought it from an Englishman.’ The house was obviously quite old. The carvings on the wall were typically Mughal. ‘I hope you don’t mind having coffee. There’s no tea in my house, I am afraid,’ said Bonobihari Babu. I felt quite pleased at this for I wasn’t allowed to have too much coffee at home. But we had to see the animals first. The living-room led to a veranda, behind which sprawled a huge garden. Individual cages for the animals were strewn all over this garden. There was a pond in the middle surrounded by tall iron spikes. An alligator lay in it, sunning itself lazily. Bonobihari Babu said, ‘Ten years ago, when I found it in Munger, it was only a baby. I kept it in a water tank in my house in Calcutta. Then one day I discovered it had slipped out and swallowed a kitten!’ Little pavements ran from the pond to other cages. A strange hissing noise came from one of them. We left the alligator and made our way to it. A large cat, nearly as big as a medium-sized dog, stared at us through bright green eyes. It had a striped body and was really more like a tiger than a cat. ‘This comes from Africa. An Anglo-Indian dealer in animals in Calcutta sold it to me. Even the Alipore zoo doesn’t have a creature like this.’ We moved on from the wild cat to look at a hyena, then a wolf and then an American rattle-snake. I knew it was extremely poisonous. An object like a long, narrow sea-shell was attached to its tail, not different from the kind of shell I had often collected on the beaches of Puri. The snake shook its tail slightly as it moved, dragging the shell on the ground, making a noise like a rattle. In the western states of America, it was this noise that warned people of the movements of a rattle-snake. We saw two other creatures that made my flesh creep. In a glass case was the large and awful blue scorpion of America. In another was a spider, sticking out its black, hairy legs. It was probably as big as my palm, with all my fingers spread out. This, I learnt, was the famous Black Widow spider from Africa. ‘The poisons of the scorpion and this spider are neuro toxins,’ Bonobihari Babu said. ‘What it means is that one sting from either can kill a human being.’ We returned to the living-room and sat down on sofas. Bonobihari Babu himself took a chair and said, ‘Often, in the silence of the night, I can hear the hyena