A sweet-sour birdie nostalgia

Love is in the air. The air is cool as if suffused with a kind of lyrical prose. A pair of painted storks flies in beautiful bonhomie. Beyond the clutches of unwarranted passions, they are a pair for life and have come here down to the plains during the winters. Till fifteen years back there was enough room for them in the countryside. We had wastelands, waterlogged lands, ponds, tanks and streams. Now everything is taken by the humans to meet the ever-increasing resource scarcity.

We had thousands of birds, including ducks, migrating to our part during the winters. Sadly, as we moved on, maintaining our acrobatic balance on the rope of ever-tightening survival, with our hybridized dreams and dysfunctional desires, ever following the blurred forms of a forever receding future, those promiscuously vibrant times met a hasty end. Now every nook corner has farmlands, human habitations, factories and roads. The last sarus crane call that I heard in the skies above must have been more than a decade back. Those were big birds, almost the kings of the birdie kingdom. Their call was a charming and quirky bugling, a sort of high-pitched trumpeting sound with long-drawn notes that went sizzling in the air. Gone are they now. Even to recall them seems transcendental.

The sweet-sour pain of nostalgia sets up a world of collapsing verses around a poet who attempted to versify the magical mystery of nature around. But my ears refreshingly echo with the sound as I write this. For a moment it gives a semblance of familial comforts but quickly recedes as the present-time’s harsh and hard realities arrive and overtake with haughty urgency. The present is too tightly woven and always seething with grievances. That past lies now like broken shards of glass. As I look at them, there are sighs of estrangement floating around.