Birds that fly – and birds that don’t

That winter is etched in my memory (to adopt a cliché). I don’t know whether I can call it winter, Palghat doesn’t have winters. It was those windy months of November, December, and January. There is an exhilaration in the air during those months of the year – a hum, a dynamic bustle, as if life cannot stop, it cannot just be. We locals endearingly call the wind “palakkadan kaattu,” in spite of our scaling skins and chapped lips. My Shelleyan mind calls it my very own West Wind.

I and Dee used to wake up to the sound of discordant loudspeaker music coming from a nearby temple. The sky would be still gray with just an inkling of red in the eastern horizon. We would gather our books – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, et al. – and troop up to our terrace to read, reminisce, imagine, and dream. A sleepy-headed Appukuttan (our spaniel, our little partner in crime) would sometimes follow us up, burrow himself between us, and go right back to sleep. We didn’t have any choice in that matter. It was our final year MA and we had tons to read.

With the first rays of the sun, a tenacious magpie would come and sit on the lopsided TV antenna and sing for us. After about four days of listening to the same song, we realized that it was the same magpie. A bond grew between us with each passing day. He would come, sit on the antenna, sing his twoo-twoo-twi-ti-twi-ti-too-woo with the exact same lilt and modulation every day. He was a fixture during those windy mornings – our lucky magpie.

Within fifteen minutes, the other birds would pick up their own songs, from where they left off the previous day. The laughing thrushes, the seven sisters we called them, would sit on the low parapet wall and start their babble. They sure were a cantankerous lot. We would give up all pretense of reading and listen to them. On certain mornings, there would be a crow pheasant (chembothu) adding to the din with his incessant hiccups.

Our Casuarina archway and hedges were a welcome refuge to little tailor birds and bulbuls. There was a bulbul nest in our arch, much to our and our four-legged partner’s delight. His was a more selfish pleasure though. With every little chirp coming from the nest, he would be down below waiting for something or somebody to fall down. The wind was almost an unwitting accomplice. Fortunately, that bulbul family escaped our little predator’s artless tactics.

The evenings were spent looking skyward and watching the migrating storks fly in a V formation. They might be from Siberia, we thought, a trifle too enthusiastically. One windy evening, a white feather fluttered down. Dee caught it, placed it in a velvet jewelry box, and labeled it “a gift from the heavens.” We somehow felt blessed that day.

Those windy months, we identified ourselves with birds. We watched them, heard them, loved them. We were getting ready to fly.

Years later (and totally unconnected)-
We – a group of friends, colleagues – were sitting together during our coffee break, chatting away, willing our break to last a little while longer, when my handsome friend commented that his hobby was bird watching. I was excited and immediately began to wax eloquent on ornithology and offered to lend him my copy of Salim Ali’s “The Book of Indian Birds,” when I sensed a hush around the table. A three-second pause and the whole table exploded with laughter and the usual ribbings. How could I ever think that my friend would have a hobby of watching birds that flew up in the sky when there were prettier ones walking on the streets of Bangalore? Well, I can be unimaginably dumb sometimes – and that is not just confined to the topic of bird watching.