Romancing with loneliness

The house carries a vulnerably wholesome air; carrying even some kind of spiritual underpinnings. There was plenty of love in the air for the lizard couples. As a proof of the deeds of the glamorous creepy lovebirds, dozens of tiny baby lizards are scampering across the house. One baby lizard made its territory around the stack of old newspapers in the verandah. It had its luck and would crawl out to take a nibble at some careless fly. It would then vanish around the paper stack, its castle. But sadly it ran out of luck or maybe the rockchat was luckier that day. As the ambience of a fly-topped breakfast came acalling, the little lizard crawled out of its castle and turned into the rockchat’s breakfast. We can say that even the fly was lucky that day because its predator became a prey. We must not forget that nature’s soft hand carries talons also. The rockchat couple that makes good use of the old, open countryside house, carrying an antiquated aura, is enjoying feasts of baby lizards these days.

The blistering heat and drowning humidity of June does wonders for the love appetite of koels. The female koel gives a rippling, tentative, anxious series of notes. The male is melodious, letting out sweetly cadenced notes as a proof of the effervescent authenticity of its eligibility and mating claims. Maybe males are more in demand in this species. A few lady koels are spreading monsoony, pining, lonely notes for the last few days.

The little room in a corner on the terrace is my writer’s hideout. It’s pretty hot inside during the summers. However, the solitude here makes up for all the heat-born discomforts. Life is only a few ‘plus’ things coupled with a few ‘minus’ at all points. For a lonely writer it’s a highly appropriate hideout. The room has a little verandah to protect against the sun and rain. There are not-in-use bulb holders and hooks on the walls. Many wire-tailed swallows fly in to inspect the site for their mud-nest. Then they peep in through the window and carefully observe the struggling writer inside sitting like an old recluse spider and fly away. Maybe they don’t find me suitable enough to be their neighbor. Once, when I happened to be away for some time, finding the room empty one couple started making their mud nest, drawing a muddy arc across the both ends of the bulbless holder. Construction work was in full swing when I arrived with my typical mankind disturbance. With an energy-exuding aura, they were enthusiastically ferrying mud in their beaks from the pond. But when they found that this fellow keeps sitting in the room looking at us all the time, they abandoned the project unfinished. The way we have tempered with mother nature, maybe our very presence evokes some illegal ingenuity against the natural laws.

In a verandah downstairs, the electricity meter has an iron box cover. There is an inviting doorway in the tin box for the electricity man to note down the meter reading. It seems a cozy house to many birds. Two sparrow couples are squabbling over the property. One of them would surely win the rights to own it for nesting. No problem in that. I’m impartial to their respective claims. But occupancy would mean they would stuff handfuls of grass into the meter box. To a sparrow couple their nest might appear ornately enchanting but from the human, and more so in case of an electricity meter, it would be a soggy mess. There may be a fire and the verandah might be smoke-suffused long before the hatchlings jingle with their frail chirps. So I cannot allow them the rights of this particular portion of the house. I fix a dark pink polybag over the box. It ruffles in the wind making an effective scarecrow, ‘scaresparrow’ sorry. One couple instantly leaves. I’m sure it’s the one that would have lost the rights to it anyway. The other couple shows more staying power. They make love on the nearby wire, staring at the pink house. They try to sneak in but the door has been closed so they fly away to seek a place somewhere else.