A home-making squirrel

 

The squirrel stays among the larger clump of trees outside the yard wall. Now and then it flits in to have a view of the little clump of garden trees—parijat, bhelpatra, guava, karipatta, champa. A cloth line is strung between the yard wall and this small group of trees in the middle of the courtyard.

Usually the squirrel runs in from below the lower grills of the main iron gate. But of late I see it crawling over the cloth line to reach the trees. Then one day I find the reason for this difficult crawl. It nibbles at the seam threads of my clothes hung for drying.

Actually it’s making a new house among the parijat’s top branches. It’s resourceful enough to pick out fluffy threads—the construction material for its new house—available near the site. After that, when I see it crawling over the line, I run to the capacity of my bones, shake the rope vigorously to make it fall down. It jumps in panic.

But it’s a stubborn squirrel or maybe knows that a poet has a severe limitation in carrying on such behavior. So despite my frantic efforts to cut down its supply lines from this end, it continues with its crawling mission.