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.”