Last weekend, I had been to Masinagudi with friends, and on Saturday evening, something happened that I still have no recollection of.

Apparently, around 4.30pm, my friends saw me sitting on the ground, hardly 50 yards from our rooms; and they thought I was calling them to show them something, so they hurriedly went to get their cameras.

When they reached me, they found me rather dazed, with my DSLR on the side. Apparently I told them that a Chital stag (full-grown) had suddenly bounded out of the bushes, hit me headlong and bounded off.

As my friends helped me back to my room, I apparently stopped to throw up twice, and threw up again after I reached my room. I then took a painkilller and went to sleep.

I woke up at 9.30pm and I do remember that I ate dinner with no difficulty at all.

The next morning, I woke only at 8am and found that my friends had gone off without me. I wandered around the neighbouring area, and since I sighted a leopard, gaur, sambar and several Chital, I was not too unhappy.

However, when the others returned at 9.30am for breakfast, they told me what had happened….and I still have no recollection of those few hours!

Of course, I posted about this incident on Facebook, and it was great fun reading the “Oh, deer!” jokes and repartee….I had so many enquiries about the fate of the stag that I said he might soon have a “Check On My Condition” page on Facebook himself!

I also enumerated the medical costs…a CT scan, consultations with neurophysicians, eye doctors and so on…and mentioned that this was why Chital were called “Dear”!

Ripostes ranged all the way to “Have a hart, leave her alone!”….I then said that now I was officially a Stag-Paati.

But the ultimate comment came from my Mumbai friend, Kiran Srivastava, who emailed me as follows:

Hi Deepa,

Hope you are not seeing double and can read this:

A certain someone went in a forest tippy-toe

An uncertain stag mistook her for a doe

Quick realisation resulted in a head butt

A skip of the hart, racing pulse, a small cut

Was it a buck, was it a Cheetal?

Despite the nausea t’was not fatal!

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Even a head injury can be highly entertaining…thanks for all the wit and humour, my dear friends!