Walking through the natural remnants

Cornered by stressful notes and peppered with pungent perspectives, I decide to beat my sense of victimhood by opening myself to the friendly humor of the farmlands surrounding the village. There is intense agriculture. Under the haunting patriarchy of the supreme species on the earth, the mother soil carrying a long haul of miseries, burdens and unmet dreams. Where will you dump your feeling of victimhood when the earth itself seems carrying the same burden?

Gone are the days of dark and deep woods. The wastelands and fallow lands, which were the last refuge of the wilderness until a decade ago, have shrunk to invisibility. The anarchist has shrewdly turned mother nature into a shadowy realm where everything is a mere utopia, a poetic fancy, judged from the mainstream perspectives. Still there are some scanty patches, almost imagistic, which pay a feeble lip service to the not so distant past when we had smatterings of scrub forest in the area. There are solitary trees and beaten down bushes by the pathsides and field embankments. It is enough to leave me bemused.

In future, the things will take a shape when even these trees that can be counted on fingers will be viewed as forests of the past. Gladly there are still many birds left and their calls somehow sound reassuring. As the battering ram goes estranging itself from the roots that have supported its evolution and growth, tottering and honking menacingly, spewing out darker and darker parables, the songs of the birds still hold feeble musical threads linking our imperiled existence to the divine melody emanating from a distant corner in the universe.

I spot an Indian roller, a striking Cambridge-and-Oxford-blue bird. It was obdurately peeking into a bush from an electricity wire, its biggish head tilted at an angle, just about to pounce upon some frog or lizard. It batters the prey on some nearby branch to have a nice supper. The colorful bird gives an assortment of extolling, raucous chuckles and croaks. It’s very volatile in proposing to its remote and cold love interest. It’s a very indulgent courtship—a spectacular display involving nose-diving and somersaulting while letting out grating harsh screams. It seems to possess a pretty informed attitude. Well, you see a beautiful bird and it seems all isn’t lost yet.

Till a decade back there was a sort of wasteland stretching for about hundred acres in this area. It presented a beautiful landscape picture entirely modeled by the untamed forces of nature. I remember wandering around in that pleasant desolation. It was a wonderfully sublime feeling there. That small world of little insects, rodents and reptiles had its very own gleaming myths and anecdotes for this small-time writer. During the monsoons it would turn into a little marshland. It further accentuated the isolation treasured in its little bushy coffers. The water wouldn’t dry before the spring or sometimes even till early summer. Thousands of birdie guests displayed their adventurous quirks. What a high-pitched quacking thoroughfare it used to be!

The human population grew further and the jabbering human hands arrived to cut these last tufts of hair left on the balding head of mother nature. The pressure on the farmlands grew manifold. The low-lying area was filled with earth. Its level was raised to meet our ever-increasing demands from the cropped land to meet the perennial shortage of produce from the farms. Now the lashing raindrops just fill the furrows in the cropped fields and gone are the little ponds and puddles.

A couple of years back there still were the last remains of that scrub forest. It was a little patch of roughly three acres left out as the remnant of the fledgling wasteland of yore. A few dozen ducks and cormorants swam in its languid waters. A few waders were busy on its grassy banks.

Come now to the present. A netting has been set up above the water. The human heart seems to be possessed by the spirit of a licentious hyena that forces the mankind to put barb over everything on the earth to nail down all fellow claimants to resources on the planet. These are imprisoned waters, denied to the birds. The wires shine under the sun with beguiling perspectives, drawing a kind of superfluous resonance in the air that claws down all softer emotions with its unsentimental tautness. So we have fisheries even here in this tiny bowl of a pond. The deadly strings over it would cut down the wings of the transgressors.

There seems to be an overdose of humanity. There are no more any winged guests from the Himalayas. A lone common teal is wading through the sullen waters. A morose kingfisher vainly ogles into the muddled depth from an electricity line. Is it free to dive? Diving into the barbed waters would mean the beautiful bird itself turning into a prey, suddenly catapulted from its status of predator a moment before. There are no foragers on the banks. There is just a greater coucal sneaking among the bushes looking for eggs in little nests. What a decline in a decade—from thousands to dozens to a common teal. I’m sure the next year even this singular common teal will also be gone. There will be more people, more enterprise.

The silence around me is imbued with a sense of loss. I can vividly see the piteous corrosion of wilderness around me. The human juggernaut is plonking ahead with a sure-footed assertiveness. It hammers home the point of human triumph and majestically ticks off the last lines of natural defense that raise its challenge on the way. The sweeping fury of a brutal landscape startles me and I take hasty steps to further explore some untamed corner in the countryside.