Fall of a bird

Fall of a bird

I shudder every time an animal or bird, no fault of their own, die without any farewell.

Terry Tempest Williams described how she found a whistling swan dead by sea shore, “her body contorted like an abandoned lover” her beak in sand, no one around, legs having done the last walk, upside down, like the wine glasses in a rushed bar at the end of a hard day. and how she gave the swan a quiet burial, not before lying next to her and imagining the great bird in flight. It nauseates me that there is no burial for this creature.

A few years back, In my office, from the window, I saw a pigeon dead on the tin roof above the coolant duct. We used to stand by that window to have coffee every day. I saw the hollowing eyes and the caricature decaying each day for a month. alone and quiet she lay, sometimes a breeze disturbing some feathers. No one to remember or know how much she loved who all, and what all. What she nibbled, which part of the glide over the farm contour she relished, what was her favorite fly position in a long dive across the sky.

In a sane world, I would like to believe this is a devastating news. But, the traffic kept going, people came in and out, in cars, for Friday parties, and the winter razed on. I saw her lying there in the parapet (just below the glass window), a game of hide and seek that had the dreaded result foretold. There will be no going anywhere for her.

Someday, in the not so distant future, a new add-on to the flock might want to fly close to human inhabited places and would be stared down by an elder, citing the whitest of them all who flew too close to the sky.

Recognition

 

I want to be known as being kind and loving to my mother till her days end or till my days end.

I want to be known in forests as the squirrel player, brooks sitter, pine hugger, and one who sat with cows grazing, waiting till they came to him for a scratch on their back or on their temples.

I want to be known as one who had all the time on earth to stand and stare at the change of seasons, the city park pigeons quenching thirst at a poodle,  the rains in mountains, the lone old Labrador limping and walking on winter mornings with a woolen wrapped pullover in a silhouette of fog, the first wet pine bushes that turn pink to green in Narkanda.... As one who came each day to see the mushroom grow at Someshwar hills, who played with street dogs at tea estates (Kausani) – arriving a specified time to meet them at clockwork, noticing who has a scratch on their nose and who has found a partner.

As one who, in Delhi’s simmering summer heat, remembered the rush of water rivulets over the banyan tree on the road to Lobanj (Kausani), around which an old wandered “baba” had put on a Shiv temple, tending gardens, handing over prasad and tea to weary truck drivers to Almora…

I am the one to sit with the chai wallah in Kausani or the dhabha owner in August rain lamenting the loss of travelers and water , listening to the vegetable vendor who sent his kid to his brother at Haldwani for studies.

I want to be forgotten to family and society and occasionally turn up as a remembrance in a college reunion at pub, on the third drink half-drawn – “hey, you remember, what’s his name…” – I want my name to be forgotten, just a half-remembered face you had spent some time with.

The dark clouds must be out this cold winter at Ranikhet just below the Inspector Dak Bungalow near Jhula Devi temple. Overlooking the dark forests behind them (which are dark even in hot summer middays), one can never be sure amidst whose observing eyes you might have passed a hundred times. I want to be the one Leopards never thought about, the temple bells never tolled for.

When you take off the slippers at Chaubhatia temple, and walk past the two stone shelter bus stop where goats have siesta midday on the lone bench, leaf half hanging and eyes closed to lush greenery at the Garden of Eden,  I am the one the only-shop Maggi seller looks at says “long time since you came, sir. You now Lali has a new calf.”

 

 

Her departure

Her departure (small fiction)

 

It got to a point where he wanted nothing complicated should happen… even in those TV serials.. the ones you know, set in small towns in places like Vermont or Narkanda or Harsil, mountains and streams flowing from them, a few shops and a bar (or equivalent) and lots of gossips. Strangers attracted to each other in the town. The “background-plot-situation-resolvement” theme of drama life replicating real life.. no, no – he did not want strangers to meet. Or let them meet but let the mountains snow, let streams be not devoid of fishes or changing to ice slabs jostling in winter for a stream of flowing, liquid winter sun in their veins. Let the Bar signs flicker the same way, let the radiators not work for days when there is a winter powerline snap. Something should not change, he muttered, as he lay in the bed. The plot of changes in life no longer cut it for him. She gone like meander of cranes that graced this open land and lake each summer.

 

Must be three days in a row – not being out of the bed – sun crumbling through the white curtains, down disappointed each eve. The smell of the air never lies. It is chilly; from experience (and a bit of intuition), he knows that the Apple trees should be out blossoming, the last bus from Uttarkashi to Gangotri would be gone, only a newspaper fan, its driver Sulaimaan, would be out (due in an hour) picking sims and bartering cigarettes for JCOs posted in remote mountains that his van swings through.

 

If the day would just end  and no one calls or notices his being or passage. Let the glass sills freeze, and birds return disappointed from other side of the glass, having lusted for the sweet nectar of flower by his bed. He does occasionally get up and stumbles to get his coffee. This morning, he wanted to hear some violin (may be “Autumn from the four seasons”), smoke a cigarette (its red wedges burning slowly towards him, a phoenix leaving ashes on its wake), may be sit alone watching the lake glimmering to morning sun. They had this thing and now he has it, but it is never the same, is it, once someone departs? Why do things change, and can’t continue without plots and twists?

He wonders will sheep still gather by winter dusk in the evening in the long banks of Bhagirathi flowing in trickles this winter? He is warm in his place, and he is crying this heart out, but he has not forgotten the herders, their coat stitched-half stitched and worn-out- and dirty from yesterday’s rain fury, alighting a beedi with a wet match, their guttural sound calling sheep to bank, their shouts of greetings to other fellas.

Tomorrow, there will be a small time in the evening when they will celebrate Karthigai Deepam in his beloved Tiruvannamalai (the mountain is the flame, as Ramana said), but today, he is just surviving…

Her Leaf, Her ways of the World

Her Leaf, Her ways of the World

One, complete-in-itself, nature's fabric on another, amidst the lap of Nakuchia taal, amidst maggie packs and chai wallas, amidst mockery of crowd and spider-threaded abandoned wooden boats..amidst water-laden skies..fractalled, mandalrot-setted, nature symmetry-superimposed, perfect in camouflage of Autumn seasons, perfect in colors hued and hissed and spewed and fed and transitioned, perfect in slow amalgamation of red into orange, perfect as Christmas trees are, perfect as all decaying sentient beings are, in their loneliness, in their graves, perfect as a sunshine on rocks in a roaring dark cloudy day in hills, when a ray of sun-burst is hope, perfect in its brevity and fragility and early disintegration, and amidst the despair of quiet passage, perfect in its confidence that more will come, that Earth and sun and her tree mother will laden earth with thousands of her clones, that insects will roll in, that birds will gather as nests, that her own frail body will disintegrate but launch a thousand new entities.. in free give and take that nature perfected, so quiet and graceful in her solitudinal rhythm.

Prayer

Prayer

Oh sweet lord, is there a place then, let me ask you this,

In your sweet little garland of an Earth and in your naughty herd

Is there a place then, as I was asking my lord,

Where my face won’t matter, where I will be taken in faceless, where it is ok to be poor or ugly or luckless or culprit or ill?

Where, sweet Jesus, if I go and touch a hand or an arm, them would turn my face to the sun and we both will glow in thy name?

Is there a place, I now ask you my savouir, one more time then,

where you could come in, not as redemption, not as resurrection, but as a man of word

And be wordlessly accepted as a man of word?

Those fading shadows of a simple life

Those fading shadows of a simple life

There will be those who will always shine and live by the code of a competitive life. It fuels them, and there are many names to it – some call it a disciplined life, some success, and some power that everyone secretly craves for and never admit to want. I am no one to refute that; in fact, I might have pursued that. But as on date, I am no longer mainstream, and it took years to reach here – from oblivion enforced to reflected glory to now free-will oblivion. This was a long call to reach my ears; my only regret is I kept ignoring it through  blinding city lights and pursuit of happiness (that in themselves were never that). My only regret is that I did not heed or respect it, by hoping it will fade away in this neglect. Every time the splendor of this lone voice stood ignored, it kept silent but never left.

The sea secretly craves for its blind ancestral coacervaetes; the blind sea turtle, all just born, feeble legs still not out of calcium egg shells, hears the primordial call of salty waves and smells the planktons in foamy crests and heads alone to the ocean. It has more courage, willing to disappear into abyss and danger of an unknown world – but the courage it shows, the sand marks it pushes in its hurried bid to rush back are evidence. I lacked that courage for long, but the voice kept travelling with me, like shadows by rail tracks, like sun beams through sugarcane fields. At last, I acknowledge this force, and hope to spend time in its shadows. Oblivion, obliteration – many names given. Thank you so much for that! I appreciate this grace and thank all those who came my way in all manners. Their inclusion weaves the fabric of this brief life and I would have had it no way (though no one controls their destiny).

Edward abbey, Helen and Scott Nearing, Thoreau, Dick Pronecke, Wendell Berry, David Coperthwaite, Harlan Hubbard – All I understand from reading them is that the simpler life is more spaced out and relaxed. That a small boat wafting aimless in the drizzle wind, as free as Beavers building dams, as free as the last rain on the winter mountains, is far better than a glorified life in pursuit of many things. Thoreau wrote that the forest trees are his cathedral, Harlan Hubbard wrote that conscious living is a pursuit of deletions from life, not accumulations.

There is a particular beam of sunlight, at around 7 am each day in winter, that permeates through the upward winding road by the Archery ground at Ranikhet. A large pine tree bathes in its glory next to a church converted to cloth weave center for Army Widows. There is an Oak tree above Rani jheel that awaits the glory of this sunlight reaching it by midday (after the pine tree has let her go). There is a lonely tea stall next to the only Post Office at Kumaon Regiment headquarters at Ranikhet, where, inside the large glass jar, a few Peanut-studded biscuits await my coming. If this Covid situation improves, I would very very very much want to be soaking in them hot thank you so much! Thoreau found it at Walden, sea turtles in ocean, Scott nearing at Maine and Vermont rural farms, - why would I not find that simple life of oblivion now that life is bestowed so freely upon me?

The seed and her savior

The seed and her savior

From the tiniest of the objects, long, soft, or warm, nature creates her symphony of motion and life affirmation activities. Here is what she does, for example. She puts a small entrapment with tiny skin, a pod to hold just two seeds. And then awaits the coming together of the frost and sun (and a brief conundrum of stars too, but let’s not go there yet). If it rains, it will wait. No hurry. If its too hot, ok. Too cold, I can live with that. And when the fine day arrives, she opens forth the two seeds it hid in the pod (like sleeper cells invoking their trigger) and throws them in a spring recoil as far from the tree as it can. Thus the Witch Hazel tree spreads its wings and increases her chance at living.

It is like the trees heard what the Lord said – “some seed fell on the path, some on rocky ground, some among thorns, and could not grow; other seed fell on good soil and brought forth much fruit….”

Why then shall we await this destiny of sorrow or joy, they ask the lord hesitantly, when “with a bit of blessing and nature’s wand upon us, we can invoke where we seek the farther land, how we seek the moors, and what permutation of the sun and rain and the stars will nourish our growth.”

Is it not then moral, nay our prerogative, to seek the happiest circumstances for our growth, and if the opportunity presents itself, and with a bit of work, should we not grow wings and not yet fly, be merry and not yet be unaware of what surrounds us, seek company and yet not let them hamper my shine?

The seeds, progenitors – carriers of genetic code- condensed life, as they fly though the air (just one time for their destiny is earth), seem to ask why await the assigning of happiness that diffuses all around us and that we ourselves can choose and pick and try and be?"