The house makers

 A fresh breezy morning. Night blooming jasmine clad in bright green new set of leaves after the spell of autumnal detachment when it shed each and every leaf and looked an old man. Now it's young and sways to intoxicated gusts of mansoon wind. The natives return. It's a spotted munia couple. Beautiful rusty brown birds having a chessboard pattern on the breast. They trill even more beautifully. It's the same branch and the same section of twigs where they had set up a nest last year. I am sure it's the same couple. If I am right then birds seem to have more fidelity than humans because meantime millions of men and women must have parted ways on bitter notes over trivials. Well, none of my business to comment on our foolish ways. I enjoy the making of this irregular globular nest. It's a masterwork in deception. To a predator it would appear like a broken, abandoned nest. In reality, the eggs will be safe in an inner chamber. The father ferries big pieces of grass. He has to pay for his lusty overtures...haa haa. The mother is busy in decorating interiors. She has to pay even bigger for her emotional surrender. Last year the hatching wasn't successful. A squirrel comes and visits the tree. She is just a guest. Not a resident of the tree. I enjoyed the sight of her old womanish tiktikking...little did I know they are egg stealers also. So she must have been the culprit last time. With the addition to my knowledge about the ways of squirrels, I m better prepared this time. Will keep an ear for the agitated notes of the little birds to find out the cause of distress, like I did yesterday around noon. Busy in writing I heard the plightful softest of notes and ran out to find out the squirrel scouting around the new house in making. Had to chase it away. Lost my meditative balance also by the way. What to do? Have to support the underdogs. A birdi life saved is more important than a squirrel missing a meal. It seems so at least till I cross the final hurdles to beat the paradoxical plays of duality to see everything in the same way. Well, till then the squirrel has a tough time I tell you . I am determined on my mission born of emotions for the underdogs. And if it results even in a bump on the lined back of the irritating tiktikking nuisance, whom I found cute earlier but now find a villain due to the addition in my knowledge, I hardly care. I have turned mean in following my basic instincts guiding my emotions for the beautiful birds. I know it will play truant many times. I am but ready for the job. I have a weapon also in mind to punish it with. Taken out a flexible single strand of switch from my mother's Bamboo broom. It's waiting for the culprit. Though it won't harm the squirrel critically but I see it can definitely give her a painful back if she messes with my birdie friends. All the best little couple. Let there be a successful episode in your love tale.

A rainbow on the wings

The tiny tailorbird is always in earnest, noisy and imperturbable. It keeps on letting out monitorial tweets about anything and everything. It sounds sharp and forbidding, a kind of sword-in-hand-fighter. The green guy with tautly drawn tail seems livid about the way things are managed in the world. On sultry monsoon noons its cheeup-cheeup-cheeup ruckus has alerted me many times about a reptilian encroachment in the yard. It is such a small bird but the wondrous hardihood of raillery and persuasive eloquence might force you to bow down to it and say, ‘Hailed be thy cause Your Greatness!’

Oriental magpie robin is a very happy looking black and white bird. It has an exciting cavalcade of notes and sounds. A look at it gives you a feeling that it’s a very cheerful bird. It’s quite magisterial in looks; the prominent black and white gives the impression of a lawyer’s attire. I have never heard it sad and sullen. During the monsoons its freely cantering verses of love are a treat to listen. Its positive spirit is wholeheartedly revealing, so much so that you feel good after listening to its songs.

The only other guy who can beat the magpie robin in lyrical positivity is the white-browed fantail flycatcher. The birdie chap resonates with fun with his mesmerizing dips and dives to catch fleas. He seems very free; beyond fear and its consequential rigidities. He flip-flops artistically and sings with voluminous range of notes. I have never felt him to be desperate; his is a relaxed foray, almost a play with the fleas even though they have to pay with their lives if they lose in the game. A fun-loving guy basically, he spreads his white-edged fantail while he modulates and varies his notes. The notes sound lovely. His best signature note is ee-ee-oo-oo-aa-aa, a distinct composition for love, which is basically a lively whistle of six notes. Well, sometimes he modifies it to make it of eight notes.

The peacocks look beautiful but their hoot is too candid and much acerbic. It pierces one’s ears a bit ruefully. It’s meticulously ebullient with high-pitched notes capable of dislodging the ball of wax in one’s ears. They are the national bird so giving them more share of fame I would say their peee-hooo siren call sounds boldly virtuous shout of a rigorist.

The sparrows have chirpy effervescence. It carries the pleasant hustle and bustle of the birdie world. Their chorus is pretty coherent. It can raise one’s spirit on a bleak dawn.

The crow has vivid but confounding notes for human ears—as if the guy is busy in sharpening his cleverness and use it against the humans. Many times his cawing almost scoffs at the listener.

The babblers hurl their twein-twein-twein domineeringly. They are always miffed at something and protest vociferously. If the koel is classical, they are plainly massical. They launch their te-te-te as if in pursuance of a long unsettled dispute.

The doves are mostly silence-wreathed but when they speak—except the laughing dove which seems to laugh even while she is crying—they carry distant or blurred notes of pain and suffering. They are for relaxing and complacency; don’t carry the zipping enthusiasm usually seen among the birds.

I don’t have the mesmerizing and bewitching whistling thrush around me. But the coucal, almost at the opposite end of the spectrum in tone and melody, sometimes comes from the farmside and gives a factory hooter kind of echoing call. It sounds an exuberant denial of the humans’ sole right to shout.

Oriental white eyes raise barely audible little trills of anklet bells—an elegant softly jingling rhetoric if you care to listen to the complaints of such a little bird.

The red-vented bulbul’s notes carry lots of emotive significance. Their name sounds lyrical and poetic but they are always mired in competing concerns with fellow birds of all species. When angry they become awfully confounding even to a human watching the show.

The wire-tail swallows let out finely crafted chip-chip sounds as they swiftly dart in airy spaciousness, picking up midges midair and even chipping a lice from your head if you dare to come near their mud nest.

There are genuine echoes of mother nature in their—the birds—calls. In a world cluttered with controversies, I listen to their calls. Their chattering is a treat during the peaceful, intimate pre-dawn air. Wherever or whoever you are, mentally bruised, homeless, dissident or outcast, listen to the call of birds. Even if your world is crumbling, listen to the birds. No words, no advice, no preaching—just the sound of mother nature. They are the threads to the silence of trees. The trees are the threads to stones. And the voiceless threads of mute stones are the passage to the womb of nothingness. But to begin with listen to the birds. 

The small world of a poetic man

 

The birds seem to hold a nobler form of love. Wild free-will carried by their wings. The reflection of love on the screen of life seems tranquil, chirpy though, and wholesome. We on the other hand carry lots of false modesty on the grand old mule track of love. Our reasoning gets clouded with passion. Our emotions spin colossal tangle as we walk on the woodcutter trails in the forest of love.

Men are mostly snapping their jaws like sunning alligators trying to eat butterflies—to quench the insatiable hunger as well as provide amusement to the bored self. And women, beautifully enigmatic and amusing, scented breeze in their tresses, ravaging silence behind their gossips, they almost borrow happiness at a hard price in a male-dominated world. They have their pain and undulations while hanging between lucidity and illusion.

But the birds possess a nobler form of love, as I mentioned earlier. The wire-tail swallow couple, for example. They are the resident birds in the neighborhood. I see them flying around for most of the year. They are extra active during the monsoons. In the musty, humid air of July and August, they reflect extra dose of love, of being together, of caring and sharing. Despite their chipping quick notes, airy swirls and swift flapping of wings their love seems calm. Lyrical and real; very natural without any superfluous infusion.

Unlike young clandestine lovers in some town in a deeply conservative society, all sly and telling a lyrical lie, foul words stamped on perfumed paper with a luminous ink, the birds are free to spread their love on free wings.

The monsoon breeze is cooler. The swallows have a permanent nesting place on the verandah ceiling. They always modify the last year’s mud nest. There is a cable going over the yard and I see them making love on it after fixing the house. It’s never a hurried and pushed love like we humans. First they take their duties of setting up the nest and only then they allow themselves some pleasure. They seem so light—devoid of the extra weight of wisdom and knowledge. They are contended with the primitive trinket—mother nature’s raw bouquet of life and living—and do full justice to it till death’s slingshot brings them down.

There is a very lucid conviction in what and how they do it. But the mankind is different. Our love’s character is furrowed by pain. We are caught in childish entanglements with dramatized perseverance. The funny authors of our own huge shame and tiny fame. We die every moment to sign in the gold book of life. The streets are vice-ridden and in disarray, crowded with distinguished, arrogant and prejudiced people. The scene revolting and ridiculous. Duplicities drizzling. Ingenuous villainies abounding. Mirrored doors stop this street clamor and try to retain the beautified and glorified private interiors holding little patches of succulent swamps. An effort to create a minute trace of picture-card peace. Gold thread embroidery on the muddy clothes mired in arduous morass. Cosmetics layered over enfeebled charms. Almost like an illicit dose of love—like a married man climbing into a widow’s bed.

Beyond all this, I try to acknowledge and admit the possibility of real, natural love in the human world.

She, the wire-tail swallow lady, is plump now, carrying eggs. They are usually comfortable with my presence but sometimes play mischief and swiftly almost graze my just-shaven head, chipping away with a birdie joke maybe.

They do it now as I watch the labored journey of an earthworm in the yard. It started from a corner very early in the morning and after three hours I see it just a dozen feet from the destination, a little wet flowerbed with fresh mud. It seems a very adventurous earthworm. Luck, as they say, favors the brave. It has beaten many accidental possibilities in reaching this far in the journey. It’s a lovely sight to witness such a fruitful homecoming. To add my helping share to its struggle, I decide to keep a watch till it reaches home to undo any risk because there are many a slip between the cup and lips.

A squirrel has shifted her base. It had its nest outside the wall among the clumps of trees. But there are snakes there, so possibly it’s changing house to avoid encounter with the reptiles. So looking for a better lodge for its little ones it has made a nest of cloth strips, cotton and dry grass high among the branches of the parijat tree in the garden. There it comes bounding from under the gate’s lower grills, its kid held in mouth. It almost bumps into my feet as I stand guard to see the earthworm safely home. It takes a sharp turn and looks worried from a distance. A mother shouldn’t be stopped like this. So I move away and here it comes and climbs the tree to show their new place to the kid.

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.