Memories from better times

This is first of the series of posts (not in chronological order) about the random recollections of my childhood. It might sound like it happened in some town or a village but all of this has happened in Hyderabad – the city that has changed so much over the years that when I visit the those places in the city where I grew up I struggle to recollect my memories from better times

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One: Butterflies and Dragonflies

There was an open field towards the end of the lane in which we lived. The field lead to an upslope beyond which there were railway tracks. The field (a swamp really) had a dirty lake at the center with the sewage like water supplied by a creek flowing from some unthinkable sources. It nevertheless was water and formed the basis of an entire ecosystem around the lake. Wild shrubs, plants, grass and even trees thrived there which in turn supported various insects, butterflies, dragon flies and birds. There were chameleons too always hiding somewhere in the bushes or on the trees. I rmember, as a child, I had just learnt the word ‘camouflage’ at school. I couldn’t stop bragging in front of my friends about the ‘exclusive’ knowledge I possessed every time I spotted a chameleon. “You know it camouflages itself so that the predators don’t find it and eat it”, I would say. And, there were pigs who enjoyed bathing in (even drinking, may be) the filthy, stinking water and didn’t care about a thing in the world as they feasted on you-know-what! We called this ecosystem the ‘Nala’. (Okay, ecosystem is very euphemistic but for the lack of a better word let’s call it this)

My house was a couple of minutes away from this place and most of my evenings were spent here hunting for butterflies and dragonflies. It was almost a ritual. As soon as the rickshaw dropped me back from school, I would run towards my house, hurl the school bag inside through the open door and run away towards the Nala. I would always hear my mother’s voice screaming behind me, “Drink your glass of milk before you go anywhere”. But apparently, there were more important things to do than drink milk. So, I would run away. And those important things were catching butterflies and hunting for dragon flies.

Catching butterflies was not such a difficult thing to do, especially the bright yellow butterfly with orange spots on its wings and black lining everywhere (It is called Common Jezebel; now I know but then I didn’t –there was no Google then). It was the easiest to catch. But there were so many different types of butterflies. The small blue one (it looked like a five paisa coin) was the most slippery. It always anticipated your next move no matter how still you were before you try to grab it. Catching it was a prize in itself – a matter of pride too. Then there were the brown ones that no one liked to catch. They were ugly monsters.

Hunting for dragonflies was a whole different ball game. Please note that I use the word ‘hunting’ here because that’s exactly what we used to do. We were mean hunters – with traps, nets and evil strategies. The nets were essentially uprooted congress grass (also called parthenium – thanks Google) tied together to form a big Chinese fan like tool with the leaves and pollen forming the net which would trap the dragonflies. The strategy was to stand still and try to get as close as possible to an unsuspecting dragonfly and as the opportunity presents itself, pounce on the dragonfly with the congress grass net and capture it. There were occasions when the dragonflies would escape through the small gaps of the ‘net’ but generally this would work.

As with butterflies, even in the case of dragonflies, there were different types. There was this regular black helicopter-like big dragonfly (I know now that it is called black marsh trotter) which would easily get captured in the net. And, there were those special dragonflies which required experience and skill to capture – the rani (queen) and the police. They were actually damselflies but we didn’t know then. Their slender bodies and weak flight required meticulous planning on the part of the hunter; any rough step could kill them. Frankly, I was not too good with catching these; I just stuck to capturing the regular big dragonflies.

There was another group of children who caught butterflies and dragon flies. But they were brutal in their mannerisms. They did horrible things to their ‘captives’ not unlike how the Nazis treated the Jews. They would tie threads to the bodies of these creatures with the other end of the thread firmly tied to their hands. The poor creatures’ flight was restricted to the length of the thread. These kids would also put their captives inside empty match boxes and on many occasions the insects would die of suffocation. It was an extremely disturbing sight. What was even worse was that they would pay no attention to our pleas and requests to let the creatures free. It saddened us to the core and after some time we stopped running after dragonflies and butterflies. We didn’t want the butterflies and the dragonflies to think that we were friends with these people and draw inaccurate conclusions about us.

And, the sighs continue...

“I am not happy with what I am doing nowadays…”
“This was definitely not what I thought I would be doing two years later when I started my MBA…”
“For the entire rigor, hard work and slogging I went through during my two years in MBA, is this what I get?”
“I just can’t find the right girl to marry. How are we going to decide, in one meeting, if we will be able to live our entire lives together? This is stupid. Impossible!”
“We are growing too old… I feel old already…”
“I can’t imagine doing the same thing for the next five years or more or for that matter, less”

Conversations nowadays are incomplete without these sentences thrown in at regular intervals not unlike a person suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for cleanliness; her day is incomplete without washing her hands (or whichever part of her body) every now and then.
Days begin with a sigh – an exasperated sigh for having to go through another day of this boring routine. And, no it doesn’t stop with that one sigh.

The sighs continue…

When I put on my trouser and, with great difficulty, manage to fasten the last button of the trouser
When the security guard at the office entrance doesn’t let you in without checking your “eye-dee”
When the second security guard doesn’t let you in without checking your “eye-dee” and your bag
When the third security guard doesn’t let you in without checking your bag (yes, again!)
When you turn up late to office and people around you give you that ‘you-are-always-late’ look
When you turn on the computer and find your mailbox filled with spam mails from all the unnecessary groups in the company doing thankless work
When you go for coffee to the cafeteria and find half of the company folks there in queue for their ‘cup of tea’
When you go for lunch and find the same menu written in the same illegible handwriting with a host of spelling mistakes (not the same, spellings change every day)
When you sit staring at your Google homepage thinking hard what to type and nothing comes to your mind
So, you get the flow right?

And, the sighs continue…

With all the negative thoughts and depressing news around me, I decided to become an optimist and think about some positive things that surround me presently which get overlooked and ignored because of the negativity around. So, instead of thinking of all the things that make me sigh, I decided to list things that I enjoy – small things that make me happy. So, here I go:

Those quick jigs in the office lift to the song playing in my iPod (Only when I am alone in the lift, of course!)
Those hours of chatting, cribbing, gossiping over one cup of Assam tea
Those aimless errands in the office campus only to be shooed away by the security guys
Those over the top plans for the weekend, most of which do not work out!
Those roadside mirchi bajjis sold right across the street
Those bike rides back home without the slightest care for other people on the road

But I am able to think of only these many things as of now.

And, the sighs continue…

Black & White

The Unwise Falcon: A wise falcon hides his talons!



The Rustic Home: To grow old and go to...

Life, Death & Fluttering Nuisance.

“Hush…Bhurrr…Fly away you moron…Off you go….Don’t come back ever again.”
But it came. Everyday. Every hour. Every minute. If you thought only dogs have curled tails, think again, because pigeons are worse. They just do not understand that I did not want them to come back. They act purely on instinct, on habit. They are stupid. So however much I would intimidate them, they would come back as if nothing had happened a minute ago. I got tired of running over and again to the balcony to shoo them away but it did not seem to matter to them. They were stupid. How could it matter to them? So, this ritual would take place everyday, every hour, and if I had the patience, every minute. It was all about my patience because they shamelessly came back. No self respect, absolutely.

Then I had to go to Mumbai for four days. Of course, it was more important than shooing pigeons. So I went. When I was travelling, I read this poem by Robert Frost – something to do with a minor bird. Let me quote it here:

I have wished a bird would fly away
And not sing by my house all day

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear it no more

So far so good! I could perfectly identify with Robert Frost. An honour, I must say! I share same feelings as one of the greatest poets world has ever produced. But then he changed his track. Why this sudden change of heart, I did not understand.

The fault must have been partly in me
The bird was not to blame for his key

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence a song

I couldn’t identify with him any more. Two reasons for this: First, it was a bird which sang not a pigeon which irritatingly gutergooed all day. Second, he was Robert Frost and not I. So, not even the great Robert Frost could change my heart. I still loathed the pigeons. I was just hoping to get a surprise when I return. I would close my eyes, move towards the balcony, slowly open the door and voila! No pigeons!

It was wishful thinking. The pigeons had been family planning in my absence. And, now there were these two eggs nicely planted in the corner of my balcony using twigs, straws and my slippers (yes, really!) as an excuse for nest! Pigeons are not only stupid, lame, shameless but also extremely lazy! But I could not do anything now. Their conspiracy had worked. I couldn’t shoo them away with the eggs in my balcony. So I gave up.

I just persevered till the eggs turned big (This is what I thought, the eggs were too small for the babies to come out) and the pigeon-lings hatched into the cruel, competitive and merciless world (And, because pigeons are also an integral part of the world, the world is also lazy, shameless and stupid). So, one not-so-fine day, the eggs hatched. The chicks were ugly with ugly being used a very euphemistic word here. They had nothing of the pigeon gray on them, they were yellow. Now, I got another reason to hate pigeons. They show their true colours, quite literally, when they grow up.

I saw them grow. It is amazing how fast they change. On one day they are ugly, yellow, mangy, little lumps of flesh and the other they suddenly turn noisy and irritating while maintaining their ugliness, yellowness, manginess and bigger lump-of-flesh-ness. So, they grew uglier by the day. They started changing colors now with a tint of gray, shade of white and patches of blue all over them. My friend found them really endearing and cute and he fed them. They could not eat, so the mother ate everything.

The pigeons are also always hungry. Try this. You throw a teaspoonful of grains; they are eaten up in 2 minutes. You throw a fistful of grains; they are over in 2 minutes. You throw a bag full of grains; they are over in 2 minutes. I did not try this, but I am sure, if you throw a sack full of grains and they will be over in a jiffy. The pigeons just don’t know how much to eat. They eat like there’s no tomorrow. I have been told there have been cases when pigeons died because of over eating.

The chicks became bigger and the feathers grew out of nowhere. The yellowness was almost gone. They were becoming tolerable to look at now. They could not fly but always fluttered their wings. This annoyed me but when they would unfold their feathers, the sight of the inner darker version of their feathers was amazing. Mom would still feed them. They looked big enough now but were still flightless. Just a few more days and they would learn to fly – to explore the exciting limitlessness of the sky and to hunt for food through tree tops and dust bins. About 5-6 days was my surmise. Of course, with this they would become independent and away from the protective shield of their mother. Every day would be a fight for survival. I suddenly did not want these pigeons to go in to the cruel and competitive world.
But they did and not in a way I had anticipated or wanted, despite my hate for them.

The earlier night, I had slept a little too late. I had no morning classes the next day and had plans of sleeping through the breakfast and getting up just in time for lunch. But the pigeons had other plans for me, as usual! They had conspired to ruin my great plans for the day. The next day early morning they fluttered and flapped so loudly and so continuously that I had to wake up, go to the balcony and ask them to shut up. Well, they did not listen and resumed as soon as I got back into the room. I tried hard to sound proof myself with the help of not-so-efficient pillow but all in vain. The fluttering continued and I could sleep no more. So here I was, wide awake at seven in the morning with absolutely nothing to do. I had breakfast, watched a movie, had lunch and attended the afternoon classes all the time cursing the pigeons.

The same thing happened the next day. I was foolish enough to sleep even later than the previous night only to be woken up by the continuous flutter of the most irritating birds on the planet. This time the flutter grew louder. I had decided not to get up no matter what! I pressed the pillow hard against my ears and tried to sleep. But the pigeons, being pigeons, did not give up so easily. I felt the flutter growing and coming closer towards me. I must have left the balcony door open, I had thought. I could almost feel the feathers of pigeons near me now. That was it. I could take this no more. I had to teach them a lesson now. I got up in anger from my bed. My eyes which were red with anger suddenly did not know which color to assume as they saw the silhouette of a cat expertly carrying two continuously fluttering pigeons in her mouth out of the main door…