Cancered farmer and beggared peacock

There is an addition to the diminishing bird life in my village. As tractors take angry mechanized burps, cattle bellow, buffaloes bray, still-remaining house sparrows tweet, rest of the pigeons coo, irritated crows croak and pigs snort, the peacocks add their voice to the rustic humdrum. The peacocks scream, is it a mating call, or distressed plight, I’m not sure. I don’t think our national bird, occupying a lofty position in the rule book, likes humans as such. It’s a punishable offence to kill a peacock. But the killing should be direct, specific, with the proofs of blood and slaying visible at the spot. However, indirect killing, the slow killing over a period of time, in the form of loss of habitat and introduction of poisonous inputs in the farms, goes unpunished--as usually with slow crimes which unfold over a period of time, losing the track of crime and the perpetrators spreading over a whole group of society and institutions.  

So they risk their lives to enter the human habitation. It’s a forced migration. A feathered riot of colours, they are the latest beggars from the species who can no longer sustain for themselves and look to the man for survival. Irony here, it is the same man who has grabbed their share from the nature. But then the robber can very well impersonate as the philanthropist. It massages the conscience for a mushy-mushy feeling. So the peacocks look forward to get survival crumbs here. The nature is dying, so how will its offshoot, this feathered riot of colours survive under the onslaught. They prefer to run on their paws in a forest. But that is perilous in a village street. Dogs chase them, cats lay around predatorily and urchins throw stones. So the peacocks with multi-hued splendour of their trains have to heave their huge feathering from roof-top to roof-top, looking out for grains and chapatti thrown by their enemy to salvage some punya from the basket of sins.

Their trumpeting peehoo goes vain like rest of the species’ role in making nature what it was and brought mankind to this level. The peacock even holds the copyright to the best of colours that we humans boast about in our designs and aesthetic portraits. But the poor thing doesn’t have the in it to encash the royalty born of this copyright. Its metallic blue, bluish-green, iridescent greenish blue, bronze-green, black and copper markings and glossy green shading is no longer a wonder for the modern man. It does not create awe anymore. The long train made up of elongated upper-tail bearing colourful eyespots is just a pattern on a bird.

Whenever there is a chance for courtship, the train is raised into a fan and shaken to impress the females. Love in times of war. There are risks of being caught and preyed upon. At least the male attracts some iota of appreciation due to its colours. Poor peahens, on the other hand, with their greenish lower neck and duller brown plumage hardy get noticed. If there is a crumb to be thrown, people prefer the peacock and shoo away the unattractive female.

The land under cultivation, where they forage for grains, snakes, lizards and small rodents, is under poisonous assault. That land is no longer for them. In fact it is not even for the farmers—in the medium term. With population blast, decreasing land-holdings, increasing costs and decreasing returns, the farmers delve deeper into their pockets to buy more killer pesticides and poisons. They just cannot afford to lose a crop. A season’s loss and their fate go down the drain. So the survival comes at huge costs of injecting insecticides, pesticides and weedicides. The poison not only kills the small world that sustains birds like peacocks, it enters the ground water and goes into the food chain as well. The cases of cancer in the village are on the rise. The numbers are far more than the cities ill-reputed for life-style diseases born of pollution and lack of physical activity. The farmers die of slow poison, three or four every year due to cancer. The peacocks roam around the village with their screams. It’s an ominous shriek. The world is but too busy to survive in the short term, even if it comes at the cost of slow-death some years down the line.