A tale with teeth

One never knows what might bring a childhood memory back to life, but a stuffed crocodile on a bureaucrat's desk did the trick this time.

Eight years ago, my childhood friends Shorty and Ingar decided that Ras al Khaimah was a boring place. At some point, the 15-year-old boys decided that the only solution to their teenage monotony was on sale at Fish Oasis: a baby crocodile. The boys saved their pocket money for a few months and when they had finally collected Dh200 they marched into Fish Oasis and came out with a 40cm Nile crocodile. No questions asked.

Knowing that their parents would disapprove, Shorty and Ingar decided to keep the crocodile on Shorty's roof. Their parents would never know. Each morning we waited in the schoolyard to hear news of the crocodile. We had placed bets on when Shorty's mother would find the croc, how she'd react and how many weeks Shorty would be grounded for. If Shorty's father found the croc, we knew we might never see him again.

The discovery never came. The crocodile, thinking that the roof was a boring place, disappeared. We assumed it fled down the drain pipe and wandered the backstreets of Khuzam, living off leftover Hot Breads croissants and scraps of shawarma from the Khuzam market. A few months later, we heard that the police pulled a crocodile from the mangroves. Ingar didn't say much. "Maybe it was somebody else's crocodile," said Shorty. "What? It's possible."

The man-eating crocodile of the RAK mangroves became a piece of Ras al Khaimah lore. As years passed, its legend was overshadowed by the escaped six-foot pet iguana known as the Dragon of Muntasir Street, rumoured to be a man-eating beast that ate cats and stray toddlers. In fact, the vegetarian iguana preferred a diet of red hibiscus flowers. The lizard had also escaped from a rooftop abode. After falling two storeys to the ground unharmed, it walked three kilometres to Muntasir Street, earning its new moniker and terrifying neighbours who didn't know of its predilection for hibiscus.

The crocodile was forgotten. Or so I thought. Eight years passed. Last week, I stepped into a government office and saw a small stuffed crocodile balanced ferociously on a director's desk. "Nice croc," I said. "Where's it from?" "Ras al Khaimah!" boomed the office director. "It's a Ras al Khaimah crocodile! No, really! Would you believe we found this in the mangroves here a few years ago?" Would I ever.