An abandoned beehive in the garden

 Natural honey is a precious thing these days and the honey-loving eagle is also rare. It’s a little, poignant tussle between two rarities, a kind of unrelenting oscillation between despair and hilarity. The honey-buzzard returned the next day as well. It seems almost destitute and runaway, so few of them are left after all. It took a big slice. It’s a lucrative trip but it chronicles an irony as well. There are so few beehives and the honey buzzard’s beakful of takeaway seems like the sadistic savor of a glutton. The honeybees belong to the little garden and hence to me it looks a deplorable act by the eagle. There I stand in the melded eerie of reason and emotions. The reason pardoning the eagle and the emotions feeling the loss incurred by the bees. Great is the winged hunter’s predatory dive and equally great is the bees’ craftsmanship and the alchemy of transforming pollen into nectar. The bees so homely and the eagle seems so distant, weird and peripatetic.

There I stand with my dystopian look, skeptical oeuvre, hasty impetus and restless impulses. Primarily our attitude between a loss and a new beginning is shabby and provisional. Our thoughts febrile and random. The sense of loss is hundred times palpable than any other effect of any consequence born of our efforts. From the ramparts of my fortified illusions, the house of bees seems in tatters. But the bees hardly suffer from the effects of simple happenings that we perceive as haunting mirages of loss and agony. So while I stand morose and disheveled, they show painterly aesthetics to draw new lines on the endless canvas. And with a fledgling and buzzing sense of duty, they make a new beginning. They understand that it is the time to move. Their take on life and living is beyond mere commodification of one’s efforts. Moving on without any grudges is an inseparable part of their nature.

I’m but caught in my mundane and superfluous catalogues. Something is missing from the yard. It’s a sad sight to look at the empty hive. With an irreducible sense of duty, a few of them are still busy in taking away the last remaining granules of nectar. A nostalgic winding-up of affairs. I’m sure they will have more pollen somewhere with the spring coming and many flowers blooming with vivid full smile. I hope they will return with the onset of monsoons on a luminous day. In fact, they come every year. But there is something missing. The abandoned hive is just three or four feet above my head when I stand under the curry patta tree. I used to be welcomed by soft wafting smell of honey as and when I passed under it. It’s always a sad sight to look at an empty house, the house that was so alive with activity till a day back.