Met Bat Met by Mr. PA

In Calcutta, between 1777 and 1782, Elijah Impey, first chief justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature, and his wife Mary hired local artists to paint the bestiary known now as the Impey Album. Most of the subjects of that many-colored menagerie are birds. Perhaps it was to lay proper claim to its status as a mammal, in the midst of that lumpen mob of winged non-mammalian avians, that the Great Indian Fruit Bat, holding open its wing membrane qua overcoat like some creepy exhibitionist, offers the viewer a glimpse of its anthropomorphic anatomy, an anthropomorphism underscored by the bat’s upright position. Mr. PA describes how, after first recoiling in disgust and disquiet upon his first, twilit sighting of the Impey Fruit Bat in a room of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, he eventually came to love it. He recounts for us here his process of familiarization in a train of thought riddled with all manner of reflections, including his own observations about being Turkish.