An Aural Journey through Nagarahole: The Language of Deception

Nothing in Nature exists to befool humans by design. We are well above the deceptions of the Venus flytrap and the ‘spectacles’ of a cobra. Our perceptive intellect allows us to see through thedubious parenting of a cuckoo and the shenanigans of a firefly. Yet, there’s one thing that often succeeds in pulling the wool over our ears: sound.

What we see when we hear something isn’t always what it is.

Still reeling in the aftermath of the tiger encounter, you plough on into the afternoon. ‘We go to the backwaters now,’ exclaims your naturalist. The air is warm as the draught from an oven but movement through it gives it the semblance of coolness. You wonder how when every other type of friction produces heat, the motion of air against the skin serves to dissipate it.

As you thus regard the seeming paradoxes of silent tigers and vexing thermodynamics, the faint beginnings of a rhythmic, drawn out sound meet your ear. You look up and around to pinpoint the corner in which a blacksmith seems to be sharpening a knife by grating it against a stone wheel, for such is the hard and high-pitched metallic drone.

The next moment you find yourself in the midst of the jolly din, as though a whole gang of these invisible knife-sharpeners were in concert! Then a new dimension emerges to this performance: a distinctly electronic chirring that at first sounds like the static of a radio being tuned. Then it seamlessly morphs into a track that adds harmonics to the background buzz in an undulating staccato of a raked pitch, like a DJ working a disc in slowmo. Suddenly, more ‘voices’ join this symphony, making a chorus of a deafening volume, louder than the Silk Board junction at primetime.

You wonder what extraordinary creature is cooking up this clamour: an army of frogs retrofitted with amplifiers? A colony of stressed palm squirrels squealing an inspired performance belying their default firmware? Or in fact a large assembly of rattlesnakes (of which none exists in Kabini) wagging their tails in concurrence?

But you realise it’s not an amplified amphibian, a mammal under duress or a defensive reptile, when your naturalist declares: “Cicada!”

Now, besides being surprised by the way it is pronounced, you are stunned to learn that a wee insect can produce a noise of such sustained loudness, but the very foundations of your faith in earthly perceptions is shaken when your naturalist tells you that the ‘song’ is not coming from the cicada’s throat, but either the tymbal – a drum-like sound-box in the abdomen rapidly vibrated by muscular actuation – or, in a process called stridulation, simply the rubbing of its wings against ridges in its thorax!

Sure you’re familiar with rumbles of the stomach (a common consequence of deferred breakfast on safari), but it staggers you that an insect can make its belly speak louder than the throat. And as for the latter technique of stridulation, you can barely conceive that wings could be commissioned to let sound fly at the rate of decibels!

It occurs to you that the only other wing noise you’ve heard is that of pigeons as they take off from the loft of your high-rise apartment or the low awning of a streetside cafe, and this couldn’t be more different from that. Just as a series of fuel-air mixture explosions in a car’s cylinder spawns the illusion of a continuous sound, cicadas make a series of clicks at a terrific rate to create a seemingly unbroken song. But the choir is so well camouflaged, you can’t see any of its members, turning the forest into a theatre whose speakers are hidden behind the walls.