A flycatcher's dressing table

 

It’s Diwali, the festival of lights. The two parijat trees in the yard carpeted the earth below with so many flowery drops as to cover the entire yard. What celebration! The rains have been good and plants, especially tulsi, have acquired a bushy jungle shape. The tailorbird parents have their hatchling out, a greenish tailless funny guy almost as big as its parents. It hops around the leafy tangle during its post-nest training phase. It’s a mischievous guy. I saw it running after a good-behaved elderly Indian robin.

Everything is perception-based at this level of existence. So this particular section of the yard is their house, just like I have the same perception due to being born in the house. They deny my entry to their section. They raise a brain-hole-drilling din the moment I reach the spot. The wire-tail swallow couple does the same. They are agile fighter-plane type fliers. They dart with chipping sounds, coming dangerously close to my head whenever I happen to be near their mud nest on the ceiling in the barn verandah. I understand their position. We are also darting around with angry chipping sounds, insecure and afraid of losing our position, interests and stakes.

The white-browed fantail flycatcher is a distinguished bird having a white forehead with a black strip running from top to the nape, blackish top and milky white underside. It’s very lively and flicks and spreads its white-edged tail quite frequently. With its long broad white eyebrows, it flits around almost tirelessly. Flaunting white spots on its throat, it fans its tail, flicks its wings, giving quick hunting dashes midair. Fleas beware! It’s wonderful to have a pair of flycatchers in your yard. I love them for their midair antics and lively attitude. They look playing all through the day. They consume so much energy due to this tireless physical activity that the entire day is spent in catching fleas midair. Can I ask for more? Make your hobby your profession. Like they do their mid air antics while going with the profession of survival—playing and gathering food going side by side.

There is an icing on the cake as well—they aren’t too scared of my presence. Their confiding nature allows me to stand a few feet away and enjoy their fun as a spectator. Then there is cherry on top of icing—their song. It’s a melodious song comprising 6 to 8 notes, ascending, sometimes descending. Sometimes they stop it midway, leaving you craving for the entire performance.

Both of them look the same but with the spirit of an ornithologist one can spot the difference—the female is slightly paler with browner head, while the male is black with greenish gloss. I had to do a bit of research to find out which of them is doing this tireless exercise in front of the little old car parked into retirement in the yard. No wonder it happens to be the girl in the pair! Who else loves a mirror so much? The car is 21 years old and deserves graceful retirement as a vintage souvenir in the yard of a small-time rural poet. After all, it was with me during the challenging and complex cluster of life and events during my urban innings in editorial jobs. With our limited capabilities, both of us suited each other really well. Now it becomes the dressing table for the female flycatcher. She is such a narcissist. She spends her days ogling at her reflection in the glasses. It’s a rural set-up, so there is no problem of food, I mean fleas. Human to fleas ration is infinitely in favor of the latter. She can continue ogling coquettishly at her reflection and take little bites of food as fleas naturally happen to be within the range of her dressing table, dressing car rather. Such tireless flapping of wings requires lots of food. It means less fleas in the yard of a poet. I note that she drops her extras quite frequently. So cleaning the bird drops on my little souvenir at the day end is the service charge I have to pay.

She thus is a homely girl. Her husband, as can be expected, goes outside to loaf around. But he returns quite frequently to check on her. When he disturbs her dressing-car time she gives an angry, agitated, grating chuck…chuck…chuck…chuckrr reprimand. The moment he starts disturbing her self-loving ogling at her reflection, she throws these irritated notes and shifts to the other vehicle, a bit new and a tiny bit bigger than the one, which seems to be her favorite. I hope she isn’t fed up with this guy—or suspects him of double dating during his sorties outside the yard—and has fallen under the illusion that a handsome prince is imprisoned inside the car and thus goes calling from all sides, asking it to come out.

Neelkanth (Indian roller)

 Evening meditation of a neelkanth (Indian roller).

A meditative neelkanth...not for salvation, of course...just for fish...most of us also meditate with lots of fishy stuff in the mind😃

An evening party

 A late evening get together of black kites... maybe to discuss the strategies to get a few fish from the pisciculture ponds under strict human vigilance...

Lovebirds

 

It's a much in love wiretail swallow couple. They are always together. It's very green during the monsoons and there are flowers around. They fly together, they sit together enjoying each other's company. It's a resident couple as I see them year long around my place and during the monsoons they set up their mud nest at the same place on the ceiling in the Varanda. They are very possessive about their house, especially when they have the little ones.  It's very difficult for even me to visit that place, forget about cats and predator birds.

Looking to setup a home

 A wire-tailed swallow couple...seriously on a lookout for their mud nest...they make chipping sounds as if discussing the suitability of a little terrace porch facing this countryside writer's hideout-cum-writing den. Yesterday it rained a bit and they were quick to lay the foundations by ferrying mud from the street and sticking it to the wall. The swallows usually leave a heap of drops under the nest. So in order to avoid a heap of bird drops in front of my writing table I just stand under the new muddy foundations, giving them a message that there are humans around, expecting them to abandon their ideas about the safety of this place. But they don't seem to mind it too much. They sit quietly nearby on the cable network wire. They have learnt, I suppose, that to survive in this world they can't afford to be too shy of we humans.

Storks in the sky

 It rained for almost a week in the middle of October, making it one of the wettest Octobers ever recorded. The slugs and earthworms got apprehensive whether it was the mythological deluge repeated. The ones that got scared too much headed for higher grounds towards the verandah from the garden. Then the sun shone very brightly and all their fears were belied. Now they had to retreat, at a great risk of being squashed under feet and picked up by the predators. I airlifted some of them and landed them home in the flower bed. It shows if you easily give into your fears, you expose yourself to an even broader range of risks and then salvation becomes a factor of someone’s sense of charity, or kindness, or pity.

What bigger proof do I need that winters aren’t too far than the sight of storks. It seems a beautiful world. A group of around thirty painted storks hovering in the village sky. They arrived flying in a V-shape pattern, did a few redesigned sorties, maybe reconnoitering the village pond. Sadly the water body isn’t free now. It’s tamed for fisheries with wire nettings cutting the free skies from the pond’s stretch. So they move on looking for some still free puddle. Wetlands are on a decline. But the sight of these Himalayan visitors freshens up my mood. And there is hope till the sky has enough free canvas for the birds to fly.

The tiny remnants from the birdie world

 

Nothing is too far and isolated from the reach of all-pervading pollution. It’s the first week of November and the Delhi NCR has turned a gas chamber. Even though I’m located almost 50 km from Delhi, yet it smells as bad as in Delhi. The little serpentine trail of wilderness running between the canals is shrouded in metallic haze. The trees, birds, bushes, plants and the canals sulkily lay under the clawy grip of the thick smog. There is no wind to swipe away the swabs of suffocation. Not a leaf moves. Proud smog is heavily loaded upon mother earth’s bosom. If you take a picture, it would definitely qualify as a beautiful foggy countryside picture. But it would be lifeless. Over a period of time even this poisoned picture will vanish to be replaced by an even bleaker vision.

Gone are the days of big groups of birds. A couple of herons, two-three egrets and some meek cormorants play the role of moving characters in this smog-smeared, frozen picture. A tiny warbler preens from the clump of elephant grass. A parrot tweets dispiritedly. An ibis gives a pathetic, suffering call. A few black kites go scouting the ground. A coucal is busy in the tall clumps of sharp-leaved reeds. A migrant Bihari laborer has cast a fish-line in the canal. A happy news at last bringing a smile on his face. He catches a rohu, a good half kg of freshwater meat. He is still fresh after the chhath celebrations.

Some Nepalese are employed at a poultry farm. They have caught a swarm of little eels from the shallow waters of a distributary field channel branching off from one of the canals. Life has all the reasons to be busy against all odds. Wondering at the capacity of life to adopt newer and newer ways of staying optimistic even in the face of all these gloomy clouds, I move on my customary stroll along the thin ribbon of wilderness along the space between the canals.

The September coup

 

I won’t term it as nothing short of a coup, September coup. The very same fragile, see-through nest had another dove couple setting home and hearth. A surprise—two eggs survived to hatch. Many factors contributed to it. One, the yard was catless during this period. Only one feral cat spent time in the garden but I doubt it ever hunted even a mouse. Even kittens would spank it. So it spent most of the time hiding and begging a few pieces of chapatti from me when hunger would break all limits. Fifteen days of shraadh also contributed. People left lots of eatables as ceremonial offerings on wall-tops for monkeys and birds, especially crows. So they were well fed, taking little interest in dove kids.

The nest is so small and fragile that one of the hatchlings fell and died. It was a plump kid. Then it rained incessantly for three days. The little one somehow kept clutching at the tiny, tilted nest. The hatchling looked bigger than the nest. Look at the seriousness of the parents in preparing a home for their kids! Hitting a jackpot of luck, it grew to look like a dove. Then it went missing on September 25, most probably served as breakfast to some predator. But still I would consider it a successful hatching from the dove standards because the majority of their eggs don’t survive. Here at least something grew at last to look like a dove.

A noisy neighbor

 

A tailorbird may weigh hardly ten grams but its indomitable vocals surely weigh a ton at least. They can drill a hole in the armor of your patience. Similarly, a butterfly is almost weightless but doesn’t it carry tones of colors as it amusedly swerves around. Coming to the tailorbirds, maybe one of their chicks has jumped out of the nest and is hiding in the flowerbed to get training before full launch on the stage of life. I’m all for peace and I need just a couple of square yards in the corner to read my morning newspaper. But they are unsparing. The angry Papa almost crashed into my face. Given their situation, anyone’s presence in the yard is an offense to them. Taking me as a threat to its kid getting trained in the cluster of flowers, the angry bird flew into my face with furious yells of sippi-sippi-sippi in hateful plentitude.

Well, that makes it sound very close to my mispronounced nickname. My father, surely the most read person in the area, gave me the pet name Sufi. He understood the mystical liberal chimes emanating from the sect so named in Islam. The liberal philosophy of Sufism was close to his heart. But to the work-broken tongues of the farmers such soft cultural nuances hardly make any sense. Scarcely anyone had any clue to the exact pronunciation and meaning of the word ‘Sufi’. Most of them started calling me Suppi, Soopi, Sopi, or anything for that matter except Sufi. It just didn’t fit with the bucolic tongue. One tauji had firm belief that my name is ‘Sukhi’ meaning someone happy and peaceful. Well, that came nearest to the real word, at least in meaning. And now the tailorbird has devised a rapid-fired version in its own birdie language. 

Lazy bums

 The dove indeed is a silly, lazy bird. They seem to have anchored their perspectives in some utterly laidback chamber of brain. And when the parents have such condemnable lackadaisical attitude, the children definitely suffer. They are averse to any type of cockiness that enables the parents in any species to fight for something more for their kids. They seem to lack that tact, prudence and bitchiness that enables parents, especially the wards like babblers, to turn their children the center of the cosmos. This artlessness makes the dove eggs and babies almost sitting ducks to chance factors and predators.

Given their silently brooding ways, they look perilously nudging the baseline of extinction. The other birds, with their heightened activation and rich and vibrant forays into grabbing more of life and living, appear to be the powerful leaders of the birdie kingdom. The doves, on the other hand, given their characteristic simplicity seem shrouded in obscurity.

I haven’t seen a single successful attempt out of a dozen nestings that I have witnessed in my courtyard over the years. The day I am lucky enough to see a dove hatchling successfully taking its maiden flight would serve as a charming memoir. The hatchlings, if the eggs are lucky enough to survive, look so helpless, tiny fluffy scapegoats to be toed around by the murderous incertitudes of circumstances. The mere fact that there are still doves in the world, despite such dismal success ratio, proves that there is larger intelligence in operation than the human mind. It mysteriously functions and creates exceptional, lucky chances to help some odd chick to survive now and then. The cosmic intelligence spins out what we consider miracles with random lucidity. Otherwise, the doves seem all set to cooperate with the negative forces of the annihilation of a species. Suppose all the predators are taken off the scene, still the eggs and hatchlings are under as much risk as when the sky is crowded with the enemies like flies.

Have you seen a weaverbird’s master art? Their nest is a stirring symbol of safety and coziness. Its dazzling tautness equips it to stand safe and sturdy against inclement weather and hostile predators. The tangled and entwined repertoire bestows it a syncretic sense of safety where their little ones enjoy highly efficient upbringing. The sturdy nests hang with an appellate authority. Their nesting colonies on a safe tree are almost celebrated landmarks of the birdie architecture.

The doves are plain stragglers in comparison to the weaverbirds. Theirs is the weakest of a nest, a see-through, fragile, careless assemblage of few dry twigs; very small, just big enough to accommodate a few eggs; a sullen and grumpy assemblage; a living legacy of being in cahoots with the forces of destruction. If the hatchling is lucky to come out of the egg, every minute spent by it seems bizarrely traumatic. The pathetic chick looks shorn of any prospects in future. It survives only if the goddess of mortality is on some elusive excursion for some time.

You can count the eggs standing under a dove’s nest as it’s at a suitable height for a person of average built to raise hands, stand on toes and take them off. I have to be brutally candid on this. From even average parenting standards, the attempt is gruesome, distasteful and perverse. The eggs would look safer anywhere except the nest.

The doves look innocent but now I feel they are plainly dumb. From aesthetical point of view, one may take them possessed with admirable restraint but from the standpoint of parental duties it looks a repository of foolishness. You need front-end courage to defend and save your brood. The rising and falling beats in the game of survival need a stern attention. They show lovely character and good disposition when they perch on the top of a wall and coo. But all this vanishes when it comes to the practicalities of being parents.

The same flimsy assemblage, on the curry-leaf tree in our courtyard, at a height of eight feet has seen four breakfasts for the cats, crows and even an eagle. And now another one is on the way. They just lay eggs, but hardly bother about making a safe nest. There are two or three dove couples in the area. They are thoroughly lazy. They simply make love when the nature calls and lay eggs that are easily whisked away by the egg-mongers. Then they are free from the tensions of raising their kids. I think it will require some wise owl to gather them and put up a lecture about some safety measures while preparing a nest. 

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.

A tiny bird’s little fountain

 

It's been a dry August and now September sun carries extra heat. The plants and trees need water. They droop their leaves to convey in sign language that we are thirsty. So there we have water flowing around their feet. The pipe carries a tiny crack forming a little fountain. Not much in human terms but a substantial funbathing spot for tiny oriental white eyes. They are very small green birds with a white ring around their eyes. I'm reading a newspaper going slowly around the tiny fountain. Then I realise I'm already an intruder. I hear complaining trills of innocent notes above my head. They are shy and want me out of their bathing place. Oriental white eyes love bathing under little squirts of water from garden pipes. The intruder off the scene and here they jump with joy and go for funbathing on a hot noon. It's a busy world. We are now running to grab our portion of the skies in the cosmos. Among all this pandemonium for bigger stakes, I think a tiny bird also deserves her little fountain to beat the heat with a shower.

Easy times with a few birds in a little garden

 

An asian pied starling is carrying a few feet long thin strip of light fabric in its beak as it flies to its construction site. It’s a busy world engaged in making, breaking and remaking. She has an equal right to make something as anyone around. The tiny tailorbird plays mischief and takes a snipe at the lower end. The big group of house sparrows raises a laughing chorus. A brahmani mynah shrieks with delight. A peacock looks eagerly with the stately extravagance of its colors. A squirrel scuttles around with a kind of gestural vocabulary. On a neighbor’s wall an alpha male monkey moves with a haughty demeanor. Looking at him, I realize we carry a pretty hoary ancestry.

The honey buzzard hasn’t yet forgotten about its honeyed lunch. It’s circling above in the sky, maybe staring at me accusatively as I sit on a chair in the courtyard near the tree bearing the hive. I intend to write something here, but then he doesn’t know that it’s only a struggling countryside writer. He supposes that the honeybees have summoned my services to scare him. I’m thankful to him that he is scared because if he attacks I’ll run sooner than the honeybees.

There is an eerie stillness after the ripples of birdie noise let loose by the tiny tailorbird’s adventure. The little garden around me seems capable of maintaining a sustainable and dynamic paradigm. I sit with a retrospective aura, a kind of thin-veiled misty cloud around me born of engaging self-reflectivity. All of us possess multilayered individual histories shaped by the sharp edges of irony hitting at our existence with a kind of gentle madness. A gentle breeze blows with its suggestive touches at the leaves of the trees.

The pleasure of spotting a new bird

 

The knowledge of a new bird species is joyful. If you are studious type, you stand on sturdier conceptual pillars. I feel more evolved and loving, at least. Great Salim Ali’s book helps me a lot in this regard. It’s as comprehensive on the subject as the freewheeling flights of the entire range of birds in the subcontinent. Each word carries an enriching streak. The pictures give a brilliantly crisp snapshot of the ultimate birdie reality.

Here I see a new bird on the fence wall. I take long and short notes of its colors, wings, feathers, beak and everything possible about its appearance and run to pick up the masterpiece. With a great sense of an amateur birdwatcher’s emotionalism, I flip through the picture plates to spot anything matching my mental notes about the bird. Great Salim Ali will never disappoint you even if you remember a few basic points about the bird.

It turns out to be a white-browed fantail-flycatcher. It has a striking white brow. It has a distinctively white forehead and white underparts. It sometimes joins mixed hunting parties of insectivorous birds. So it possesses a pretty flexible, smart, circumstantial attitude. It flits, waltzes, pirouettes from branch to branch and tree to tree. As a tuneful tribute to the free-spirited winged birdie gods, it makes graceful sallies. Its call but is a bit harsh, a sort of authoritative chuk-chuk. But when it’s in love it makes delightful chee-chee-chweevi notes. Everyone mellows down after falling in love. Well, he is always welcome in my small courtyard and little garden as long as he catches flies as suggested by his name. There are plenty of them around.

The resident oriental magpie robin

 

The handsome dainty oriental magpie robin has picked out a particular bough for its night perch. It’s suitably located among a dense clump of leaves to give it a comfortable night stay beyond the feral cats’ encroachment. And the winter takes everything in its icy folds. The moon looks shivery with its beatific three-quarter smile. The winter means submission. The fast and the furious streak in us turns slower as if in proportion to the slower blood movement across veins and arteries. But then all of us know the seasons inevitably change. The spring is patiently biding its time at some virgin locales. We also have to wait and allow the cold to spend its freezing stores.

The lonely oriental magpie robin is a warm company to the forlorn writer in an old countryside house. I can feel his position. It’s sad to be alone at cold nights. I believe none of us is in dumps and depression. There is hardly any sun during January. The stars twinkle sometimes at night but then the fog quickly takes possession of the skies. The smog flaunts its vile vanities—even in the countryside around the Delhi NCR. The winter air is like almost being in gas chambers but still we aren’t paying any heed to the urgent climatic issues and with a flagrant indifference are adding to the concrete high-rises, spanking new complexes and thousands of new vehicles on the congested roads.

Beyond all these pressing matters, the oriental magpie robin spends his nights among a clump of kari-patta, guava and parijat branches. These intersect nicely at a safe height. The location of his favorite branch is proved by the bird-drops on the jasmine leaves below his nighttime shelter. There is a natural intelligence in creation, far bigger than our thoughts. For its nighttime homecoming, it need not look at a watch. Its coming-home time is exactly twilight, at 6:20 PM in this part. I have confirmed it a few times. It lands home exactly at twilight and breaks the eerily quiet moments with its blithely uttered charrr-charrr notes. It seems a kind of prayer before retiring to spend a cold night all alone and see another day.

Trummp

 

Trummp arrived with greenish pomp and reddish glow on its nose. The guy had a talismanic greed. Give it anything from fresh salads to cooked kadhai paneer, it would sumptuously eat whatever it saw you eating. The kind intention to keep him swiftly glided into an arduous task. When we got him, we held him in high consideration. But all respect for him lay hither thither just within three weeks. My temper raised its stick with an iron-shot end. Joyous countenance scampered away. Enormous and formidable was its appetite. All this while he was riding the high and mighty horse of gluttonous enthusiasm. I helplessly let out guffaws of desperation.

Well, Trummp was a parrot. An ascetic lives in a hut by the canal outside the village among the fields. He arranged for a community feast in memory of his guru. He had invited me so I went there a bit in advance while the prasada we still being prepared by the cooks. The parrot was leisurely patrolling the cooking area, nicely gobbling boiled potatoes, cooked pumpkin, puris and ladoos. They tried to shoo it away but it would take a little flight and come back.

The ascetic proposed that I take it. Agreeing to the proposal, we procured a cage and it was ceremoniously carried into the house. There was lingering, delectable charm about the bird. It was fat and lazy. It had philandering appetite. Its only motto seemed to be, ‘You have to give something to eat the moment you see me’. The cage tray would soon get flooded with its drops. It was pretty vocal about its eating aspirations and hungry assertiveness. It was almost paranoid about its eating habit. Deprive it of anything that you were seen eating and it would try to break the cage, the only time when it showed some physical exercise. The rest of the time, it was content to just sit on its perch and scan any opportunity to eat something.

I knew that it was a female because the red collar on the neck was missing. Still I treated it as male, in fact christened it as a male so that I could use cuss words on its person to vent out my frustration. It’s imperative to maintain decorum and one shouldn’t use ill words against a lady bird. So I imagined it to be a male rascal.

One day, I had put the cage under the sun so that Trummp could sunbathe and get vitamin D. A male parrot, vow what a sight with its red collar around neck, came screeching for companionship. He saw the pampered fat woman in the cage and immediately fell in love. Trummp also looked at it with a friendly regard. But it didn’t look too eager for free air as if it was enjoying a kind of sad enlightenment inside the cage. The passion of the love-blinded parrot was fiery and spiraling on the other hand. My compulsions were wearing thin under the constant bombardment of its demand for more and more varieties of food.

The parrot in love returned the next day also as the lazy, fat ladylove contentedly sunned its feathers. It would have been foolish not to see it happily married and lead a happy married life. After that it would be the husband’s duty to see to his wife’s culinary tastes. The first choice should be to transfer the responsibilities—instead of cutting them altogether—if you find them too heavy to carry on.

I opened the cage expecting the fat woman to go flying with its lover instantly. But it won’t come out. Food was dearer than any lover in the world. The lover was hovering around with measureless mirth. I had to literally prod out the lady’s prodigious and imperturbable laziness. The shy bride finally came out and the groom encouraged it to take a bit of flight for conjugal bliss. I immediately shut the cage and ran away with it lest the bride got its groom into it also to make him a ghar jamai.

Well, sadly though, one cannot survive with a luminous conscience and radiant uprightness during the present times. Anyway, hope they had a nice married life. Moreover, a few days of freedom are better than years inside a cage.

When there are many birds in the sky!

 The first half of November is supposed to be the best. The winter is opening like a soft bud. The birds sing at their best. It proves it’s the best part of season. A beautiful, fluid mix of balmy cold and warmth. But we have turned it the worst. The metallic haze and toxic smog grips the skies like the steely talons of an eagle strung over the soft fur of a rabbit. The eyes burn. Throats ache. The sip of life, the air, turns a slow dose of death. The north Indian planes look like a huge prison. The sun looks pale and sick-faced as it peeks weakly over the polluted planet. But then even on such a sickly gloomy morning there are thousands of swallows flying in the sky. So many of them! With so many birds, it seems as if everything will be all right. The sky seems to bless the earth through these freely flying birds. It’s the time to plant more trees and flowers. It’s the time to walk a bit slower and do something that will leave the planet worth staying for the coming generation.

The beginning of a new day

 The morning turns best by default when you wake up after 8 hours of dreamless sleep. Even a semi-cloudy musty day appears as bright as it’s on a full sunny morning. The flowers give you a better smile than you remember. Aren’t they the same flowers? But the eyes looking at their smiles are more fresh today. A butterfly, a Common mormon to be precise, is resting on a sadabahar leaf. It’s a beautiful black butterfly with whitish spots running across the hindwing. Its wings are spread, not drawn taut together in instinctive mode to fly away at the slightest danger. A resting butterfly with spread out wings is a great treat to the eyes. You get a chance to observe its colors and patterns more closely. While flying, it’s a teasing flirtatious speck of colors that titillates the heart but deprives the eyes of the beautiful patterns. A small grass yellow Eurema hecabe, drunk with youth, is all impatience and eagerness as it makes the most of its short life through airy dives and nectar sips. Probably, the resting Common mormon is middle-aged like me and knows the importance of rest and repose also after flying high. The Indian silverbill, a cute little pale white bird, has redecorated the globular nest of the Scaled munia and is happy with the proceedings so far. The monkeys have rarely allowed a successful hatching of these cute little birds so far. They are too restless for other’s peace. They just snatch away the nest. But all is well at least today and that’s more important. Tomorrow may have bright sunshine or a storm, that’s time’s problem. A pair of angry tailorbirds darts in and sits on both sides of the refurbished silverbill house. They are angry over something and have a lot of complaints. They are too loud for their tiny size. The silverbill just trills feebly like the jingling anklet on the ankle of a little girl. May be it’s a bully pair of tailorbirds who are still angry because their well-hidden leafy nest was spotted by the monkey and torn away, throwing away the chicks. As I had run to turn its bum redder for the crime, I could see one chick in its hands. If it’s a rascal monkey, like they are without an exception, it will have its breakfast. If it’s a kind monkey—which is the most improbable thing on earth—it may raise the chick and create history like the wolves did in rearing Maugli, the jungle boy. Well, the angry tailorbird are too much for the meekly trilling silverbill. Depression of losing one’s home and kids is understandable. Maybe they find the silverbill docile enough to vent out their anger. This world is but full of bigger bullies. The tailorbird’s pinchy shrills attracted a few babblers. There they arrive on the scene to settle the scores. Can anyone match a babbler’s chirpy anger? Not at all! They can give even the most querulous, cantankerous peasant woman in the neighborhood a well-heeled run for her money. The tailorbirds are outshouted immediately and they leave the field. The silverbill sneaks into its nest. The babblers sing the song of their victory for a few more moments, challenging any more mai-ka-lal to take panga with them before flying to arbitrate in some other quarrel among the lesser bullies on some other tree. And thus picks up another fresh day on its slow march to speed up later to go slumberous again at the dusk.

The Return of the Native

 It must have rained really well to make everyone feel so happy, relieved in fact, after two days of heavy downpour. It rained so heavily that even earthworms thought it was the mythical rainy cataclysm and started crawling into the house, abandoning their hideouts in the garden. Tiny frogs seem to have literally fallen from the skies if you look their sheer number. They can beat even ants in number as of now. Either God brew their seeds in the pools of clouds and dropped them at our heads or the frog couples have been extra horny on earth this season. Well, they have taken over the garden and the ones who want better accommodation have crawled into the rooms and are jumping and hopping. We have to walk very carefully. We are as much of intruders to them as they are to us. In their little minds the house belongs as much to them as we have the notion of ownership in our slightly bigger minds.

Fed up with waters, all seem to say, request in fact, ‘No more water at the moment.’ The sky is still cloudy but one can see the sun making a dent in the cloudy fabric to reclaim its kingdom. It cannot allow the clouds to rule the skies for too long because they are good as visitors only, make them permanent citizens and there will be a big problem. Well, not for fish and aqua life. But definitely for we humans. The air is fresh, cool and windy. It feels like a massive air conditioning unit is blowing after the preceding hot-humid weeks. The weather had turned so sultry and humid as to put a frown even on the most joyful faces. It has been really baking hot and humid. Global warming is a reality and we need to come out of our comfort zones and do something about it. If we miss it, the next generation may not have too many options to avert the dangers. 

Luckily, rains have been very lenient this season. Even the prickly trees are decorated with lush green leaves to appear more presentable. They are no longer the crooked nailed quarrelsome old grannies. They are now buxom happy women of substance. Drunk with rain and nutrition, the branches sway to the song of air. Butterflies have extra air in the wings and loop, curve, dive and lift themselves with the sweet nectar of the rainy season. The dragonflies go with more linear determination against the wind like an adamant drone. All seem out to play after the rains. Birds have raised a pleasant ruckus. A tailorbird couple is hammering their prickly sequence of angry notes to distract some predator from their leafy nest. A squirrel is busy in tik-tik chorus. Probably its bullying neighbor stole its nuts. An Indian Robin chips with her coquettish glance from a wire. Peacocks hoot as the kings of the season. A peacock is under bigger risk during heavy rains because its huge plumes soak so much water. When it rains too heavily, a peacock sits like a statue without moving. That is acceptance of the forces beyond our control. It knows this rainy blizzard is just an aberration. There will be blue skies to fly and sing at the top of their voices. They do it now to the capacity of their lungs. 

Coming to the peacocks! Do you recall the peacock that sneaked into the kitchen when it was really hungry and after feeding it couple of chapattis Ma would chase it away with broom complaining, ‘You eat here and drop your plumes on the neighbor’s roof!’ Ma has departed for the journey beyond this plane. It has been nearly 19 months since she left us. The peacock stopped coming after she left. It didn’t come even once during these months. But here it is today staring into the kitchen. As I came near it won’t run away. Immediately I knew it is Ma’s peacock. He hasn’t forgotten. They have better memories than we humans. I sat on a chair and fed it a chapatti and a sweet pancake. It ate from my hands. I had tears in my eyes. Probably, it can see what we cannot and still feels her presence here. Now it’s sitting contently on the roof fence, its huge plume hanging down and its upper body lost in the neem and gulmohar branches above.    

A laughing dove couple is seeking a suitable branch for making nest as a follow up to their courtship and acceptance of each other’s love. A stern looking red-vented bulbul is feeding pulpy, rain-shod guava to her two young kids who are almost ready to take off of their own. Presently they follow their Mama across the trees. Their dependence has no meaning without her love. And her love cannot manifest without their dependence. A forlorn pigeon looks languorously from its perch on a railing. Probably his girlfriend has abandoned him to fly more joyfully with merrier wings. Another pigeon is playing with the wind. It flutters against the wind, going flip-flop and ascends almost vertically and then abandons its feathery self to be blown happily with the wind to enjoy an orgasmic glide. Is it the happy goon who has taken away the forlorn pigeon’s lady? Well, you never know. Probably they also rub salt on each other’s wound like we humans. 

Kitchens are busy. Various cooking smells waft as freely as the birds and butterflies. And that’s how the song of life proceeds to adopt another day with its tireless rhythm. All this makes this Sunday a real fun day. Icing on the cake is Rakshabandhan, the festival of brother-sister love and affection. Rakhi is a beautiful reaffirmation of the unshakable sibling bond. Wish you all a beautiful Rakhi day! Brothers, give a pause to your habit of spending money on goonish follies and unstring your purse to give a bit more than you are willing to give to your sisters. Give them all you have. It’s their day today. Beyond the customary money, give them the reassuring smile that you will be always there to help them realize their dreams.

A crying Laughing Dove

 

Laughing doves chuckle cutely, hence named so. It’s endearing to have a laughing, rolling and yodeling call. But just like a comedian’s pain in the heart is always preceded by the rib-tickling laughter masking the facial features, a laughing dove’s cry also gets covered up by the rib-tickling sounding chuckle of theirs. Its sobbing, suffering cry still comes out as funnily rolling notes of a birdie chuckle. Pain camouflaged by vocal chords has both advantages and disadvantages. It saves you from mockery but at the same time robs you of sympathy that may still be there in some corner.

An eagle is for the aggressive majesty of power, domination and hunting. It looks majestic with its killer’s instinct, equipped with a hawk eye, hooked beak and razor-sharp talons. A dove is for peace. It’s a symbol of live and let live. It looks lovely with its innocent eyes, graceful walk and stoic demeanor. The eagle is for stealth and strength. The dove is for benevolent, peaceful and an unassumed life and living without much ripples on the canvas of existence. The eagle shrieks almost with a war cry. The dove coos for peace. As the two sides of the same coin of creation, they paint the picture of existence in their own ways. One as important as the other.

The laughing dove is seen, as usual, on its customary perch point on a rusted wire loop jutting out of the corner of a two storey house. His call is insistent and non-stop from dawn to dusk for the last few days. The irony is: even if a laughing dove is crying, it sounds like laughing. To those who don’t know his story, and there aren’t many who would have the time and inclination to be interested in the affairs of a dove, it is a mere love-bound chuckling laughter of the laughing dove. I but hear the pain of loss buried behind his insistent chuckle. He has lost his partner. Laughing doves are monogamous by the way. Like all monogamous birds, the loss of a partner is incalculable loss and many perish in the wake of their spouse’s death. The way he is mourning from dawn to dusk, I suppose he may not survive as well.

He seems determined to starve himself to death. I have seen him just once taking littlest mournful beak bites on the ground, the very same ground where they walked in lovely majesty picking out grass seeds and tiny insects when she was alive. Now he finds everything almost distasteful.

A sparrow couple was almost fruitlessly trying to put the foundational sinews on a very narrow edge of the wooden rafter in the cattle barn. Feeling their plight, I fixed a cardboard box on a not-in-use rusted ceiling fan. It just hung there as a cobwebbed chandelier of the cattle world with its connection wire broken. However, there were no birdy takers for the beautiful nesting house that stayed mournfully inviting and empty. There seems to be some natural intelligence at work. The birds have seen so many ceiling fans whirring death, doom and destruction to the feathered lives. So they shirked from taking the offer. Then the dove couple, egged on by their simplicity, made use of it. They put the first dry twigs not inside but outside on it to fructify my attempt at helping bird nesting after almost three years.   

The nest was—it is still there with the fossilized seal of their love in it—a very flimsy platform of dry twigs of neem branches. Marking their lovely milestone in their love story, she laid two eggs. On the path of creation, there are pulls to destruction at all points. Then the mankind’s cousin came as a challenger to the forces of creation from the side of destruction. He climbed into hang with one hand from the iron grater and pluck away the booty, one egg. I reached on time and came within the fraction of a second to turn his bum redder with a strike. He escaped unscathed. I checked and found one fresh hatchling lying there as a tiny ball of winged prospects. As long as there is some semblance of encouragement in the nest to propel their paternal instincts, the loss hardly mattered to them and they kept the routine feeding and customary watch over the predators. I have heard that the nesting adults even feign injury to distract and draw away predators from the nest.

How should a laughing dove change the amplitude of its yodeling notes to turn it into a mourning call instead of a customary chuckle? His call is the same like before. He sounds like wooing a female even though he is mourning the death of his life partner. But my knowledge of his loss turns me aware of the pain carried by these notes. He has the unwavering spirit to mourn and cry till eternity. I have the heart to feel his pain. His pain doesn’t go unacknowledged at least.

The mourner had once fallen in love. His cooing calls were reciprocated by her, the one who is gone now. Attractive was his courtship display. His adolescent wings catapulted him into the lofty spheres of love, lust and procreation. He launched his infatuated self into the air with his wing clapping, making romantic, charged sounds and majestically glided down in a gentle arc to display his youth and coming of age. He was very emphatic and impressive in his display of masculinity. The crazy lover followed her with his head bobbing accompanied with seductive cooing. And all this blizzard of passion still sounded funny because from both extremes of pleasure and pain a laughing dove has the same means to voice his emotions, his cuddly laughing cooing.

Emboldened by her attention, he started pecking his folded wings in “displacement-preening” to solicit her surrender to the physical manifestation of love. She accepted by crouching and begging for food, a gentle prelude to her acceptance of him as her chicks’ Pa and a provider of safety and companionship. With abounding passion he indulged in courtship feeding before conjugal ride and the beginning of a monogamous matrimony. They preened each other. They made a fantastic pair of long-tailed pigeons with rufous and black chequered necklace. Their chuckling calls, a low rolling croo-doo-doo-doo-doo involving a fluctuating amplitude, vibrated on the airy canvas for love and procreation. In their corner of the cosmos, they germinated a soft ripple of pining love and robust care. He as a possessive, jealous fellow won’t allow her to go too far. If she foraged far, his cooing cascaded to her ears, tying her with the invisible cord of his attention and insecurity, forcing her lilac tinged neck and head to turn in his direction and she would whoop down to be with him. Cutely they walked on the ground and ate grass seeds and other vegetable matter and tiny ground insects like ants, termites and beetles. Docile and fairly terrestrial, they foraged on the ground, their reddish legs giving them the gentlest of steppings. In contrast, they took flight with a lot of noise followed by their swift and straight flight with regular beats of wings and an occasional sharp flick of the wings. All this and more wrote a beautiful chapter in romance.

They looked almost similar in appearance save his slightly bigger size and his pinkish-brown under-side slightly colorful to her paler one. His bluish grey band on the wing was bigger than her’s. These are the features that helped me in recognizing him as the surviving mourner.

A few days back, I found the chick had died. It was a mere dried whitish tiny tissue lying in the nest. It but still kept them bound to the duties and they hovered around, walking gracefully in the courtyard around the flower beds and plants to get their breakfast, lunch and pre-dusk dinner. The two of them were always together. Inseparable. The rest of the world loses its significance if a pair in love has their world full within themselves. It made such a beautiful sight of a love-smashed bird pair.

As a birdwatcher the sight of a new bird in the area is very assuring and alluring. Four days back, the sight of an eagle on a nearby keekar pretty much excited me. The eagles are rare now, hardly seen within the village boundaries. It’s a majestic powerful bird, the sign of aggression and playing on the front-foot with assurance and confidence. I knew an eagle has no mission other than hunting. But even this knowledge cannot stop you from watching it with an appreciating eye. He looks regal. Royalty always has had claws hidden beneath the regal attire and extravagant show on the surface. No wonder he looked a veritable King of the birdy world. An eagle can afford to be restful on a tree. He appeared perched up stoically almost with a carefree air. It was business as usual. Even the cantankerous crows didn’t bother too much over his transgression into their territory.

The doves with the dead dry chick in their nest walked as gracefully in the yard as before to welcome a fresh day in their winged life. Cutting the cool early morning air with his talons he swooped down and killed her. The yard was empty, so he didn’t feel in a hurry to fly away with the prey. He ate her right there. She was now just a scattered bloodied lump of wings and feathers. Her lover just could shriek in anger and pain in his laughing notes.

Her memories continue to reverberate through his fur and he is tirelessly cooing from all the perch points that bear the smell of their love as if to woo her out of death. He thinks she has ditched him and taken a new paramour. He is confident of his cooing display and thinks he can win her back. So he continues his painful laughing notes, his heart bruised and his masculinity embittered. Little does he realize that she has gone onto be a part of her hunter. She is no longer that docile bird of peace. She is reshaped as the steely nerves and power of talons to hunt now and not just get hunted down like before. 

He cries with the passion with which he had once wooed her to make her a part of himself and turn himself a part of her. Now a part of him has vanished. It is painful to see him survive as a fraction of himself. He may not survive as a monogamous bird. I but wish that some female, who has just come of age or has been unlucky like him to lose her partner and is ready to accept a mate now, takes his crying coos as the teasing cooing of a challenging male who is trying to break the folds of feminine inhibitions and hesitation.