Bird of nostalgia

I almost saw a koel today. I've been told it's a black, rather ugly bird, but it's so shy I've never been able to spot one - though for many years I've wanted to.

Most people wouldn't get terribly excited at the idea of seeing a koel.

But every time I hear that familiar 'ku-wooh, ku-wooh' something happens to me.

Sounds – like smells – tend to prod forgotten memories, to reawaken old, lost emotions. Who has not heard a song after years and years and not felt something which has nothing to do with the song and everything to do with the memory associated with that song?

Whenever I hear a koel's ku-wooh I am so deeply moved it's almost absurd. The sound instantly sends me back to my childhood in Poona. I see again the quiet shaded avenues, the huge ancient banyan trees lining Ganeshkhind road, the hills I used to climb. The sky is blue. I can feel the soft sunshine and smell the grass. Most of all I remember the vast peaceful silence which was every now and then broken by the koel calling: ku-wooh, ku-wooh.

D H Lawrence expresses most aptly this deep sense of nostalgia in his poem Piano, based on a memory evoked by the sound of a woman singing softly in the dusk:

. . . The glamour/Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast/Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Perhaps what makes the memory especially poignant for me is that the Poona of that memory is dead. The banyan trees are gone, so is the silence on Ganeshkhind road, so is the fragrant air, so are the hills. Gone also is that vast silence in which a child could not miss hearing the call of a simple bird.

C'est la vie, as they say.