NEW DELHI: Suneeta was happier with the monkeys. Finally placed on the "bird-beat", the first and only woman to hold a position that requires direct handling of animals at the Delhi zoo permanently, was fond of the simians. She was especially fond of the little monkey that arrived on April 19, 2011, a few days before her transfer. "The doctor gave me Rs. 20 to celebrate," says Suneeta who doesn't use her last name.
Suneeta was a regular at the zoo when her father, Pishori Lal, was still alive and employed in the sanitation department. "I'd come with him. I wanted to work here," she says. Women are employed at the zoo but not for positions that require direct handling of animals. Zoo authorities are quite candid about the issue. "We don't hire women as keepers or assistant keepers," says Riaz Khan, curator, education, "We've had one as ranger but that's a supervisory position." There were also Chhoti, Anaro, Kela Devi and Pithori before her most of them having come into jobs formerly held by their deceased husbands. They got cleaning, gardening or similar 'soft' jobs; their interactions with animals were few. Raising iron cage doors, handling large quantities of raw meat, those are jobs for men. Suneeta, of course, has done them all.
Suneeta, between a brother and a sister, got her job when a heart attack claimed Pishori Lal. He never worked with animals but his daughter, then about 18, became an assistant keeper the first woman in the zoo to hold that position (or that of keeper) in 1993. "That post was free and she got it. She may even be promoted to keeper some day," says Khan.
Suneeta got the snakes first. "The curator came in to meet visitors. He'd pick the snakes up and sometimes even handed them to me a diadem or dumai nothing poisonous. They felt strange but you can't protest in front of visitors," she says. Fond of birds and monkeys, she hadn't quite bargained for this.
There isn't much she says no to, however. She had only refused a few shifts with the tigers, that too initially. "But you get used to these things. When I first started, I'd wonder where I had landed," she recalls. She wasn't ready for the oppressive stench either. An unpleasant smell always hangs thick in the holding areas. It is the food, the damp, the animals themselves. "The first few days, I carried my packed lunch back home," she says. It was better with the birds; collectively, she's spent a good many years on them. During some of those she married an auto driver and bore three children, the eldest is now in ninth grade.
"They are very proud that their mother works with animals," she says, admitting at the same time, that her job profile elicits sniggers too. But then, she is the only one in her family with a government job and when relatives come visiting, they get a free tour of the zoo. "I don't like doing that too often. I have to leave work and guide them," she says.
The animals have been good to her. 'I've never had any accidents. And now they recognize me and come to me when I call them," she says. Humans have been more difficult. She has no women colleagues, no one to share a girly chat with over roti-subzi. "The men see me differently, talk to me in a way that makes me uncomfortable," she says, "I keep to myself."
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