Who killed the whale?

The sea throws up strange things sometimes.

This time it was a dead whale that the fishermen towed in to Palolem beach.

The creature was a good twenty to thirty feet long, a mottled pale grey like the conjoined shells you see sometimes on the beach.

It must have been dead for sometime because the body was already decomposing. You couldn’t really make head or tail of it. What seemed to be the head had almost completely collapsed, and only one side of the cavernous mouth was visible. There were no eyes left.

Considering it had been lying in the hot sun all day, it wasn’t really smelling so bad. But it was an unpleasant odour nevertheless, though strangely not fishy. Nor did it smell like the corpse of, say, a dead rat. Must be all the salt in the sea.

Half the village turned up to see the poor whale. And everyone, including the holidaymakers, went on a photographing spree. Macabre the way people will photograph anything, even a decomposing whale.

In other parts of the world, from what I’ve read, dead whales make big news. Environmentalists and Save the Whale activists usually turn up to a point finger and demand whodunit. An autopsy of sorts is also carried out to find out how the whale died.

Here, there didn’t seem to be any of that. The fishermen believe a ship accidentally killed the whale.

The municipality was involved, and I spotted some garbage disposal guys with yards of nylon rope. They were planning to drag the dead whale up the beach beyond the high tide point and there they were going to bury it. R. I . P.

The profane buffalo

It’s funny how cows are sacred and buffaloes are not, though both provide milk.

What’s even funnier is how, despite this, buffaloes are treated with more care and respect than sacred cows.

Many villagers keep a cow, particularly when there are small children in the house. Cow’s milk, after all, is supposed to be the nearest thing to mother’s milk.

Yet, most cows are left free to roam and scavenge for food. No one seems to care what they eat. And like pigs, cows will eat almost anything, from grass and thorny bougainvillea to plastic bags and garbage.

Buffaloes, on the other hand, are taken out to graze and to bathe in pools of water. And they are usually given a nutritious feed when they return home.

Why this difference?

Maybe economics has something to do with it all. You can buy a cow for as little as two thousand rupees. The cost of a buffalo runs into several thousands. A villager also gets more money for selling creamy buffalo milk as compared with the thin milk cows give.

Yet, when a gaily caparisoned cow is led from house to house by a couple of ragged con men beating a drum, people will rush out of their homes to do arati to it, and to bow down before the holy beast.

The poor buffalo must be satisfied with being fatter and better fed.

Maybe mythology also has something to do with the difference. Buffaloes may give more milk, but the male buffalo at least is traditionally associated with Yama, the god of death. While cows, of course, symbolise fertility and motherhood and all those things we’re taught to reverence.

So cows are skinny and sad, but venerated and loved.

Buffaloes are fat and ugly and profane. But we like their milk, even if we don't love them too much.

Freedom is not a bird

Oh to be free as a bird, people often say.

I watch the gulls flying in formation high over the sea as the sun disappears. First they appear as an arrow in the sky, with one bird leading. Like dancers they morph gracefully into a straight line, not missing a beat. And then yet again the form changes before they vanish together into the mists rising from the water.

I watch the little magpie robin in my garden singing so lustily.

And the solitary kite circling slowly in the blue sky.

And the woodpecker banging its beak on the trunk of a coconut palm.

A flock of angry crows is squabbling in the giant mango tree beyond, cawing loudly.

A hidden koel calls plaintively from the coconut grove.

For days I watch a bulbul sitting patiently in its tiny nest, built in the crook of a tall, delicate plant. Every time the breeze blows, the plant sways and the little nest shakes like a tiny raft in stormy waters, the bulbul hanging on for dear life. Finally, the egg hatches. A neighboring cat kills the fledging bird.

I watch a tiny green bird dip its long beak into pink fragrant flower, a cat stealthily pad behind a great coucal in the undergrowth.

Why do we imagine all these birds to be free?

They’re not free from hunger or the fear of predators.

They’re not free from the vagaries of the wind or the rain.

They’re not free from the instincts that nature has given them.

They’re not free even to make a simple choice, as we are.

We are free to choose not to be slaves and bigots and liars and oppressors and thieves and murderers and traitors and scoundrels and terrorists and whiners and cowards and cheats and drunkards and fools –

If it was free to choose, maybe the bird would wish it could be free as a human being. But then again, maybe not.

The long and winding road

Narrow lanes meandering through utter wilderness are a peculiar feature of the Goan landscape. You see them everywhere, suddenly branching off from a main road, veering off into the great unknown.

I drive down one of them, wondering.

The lane curves lazily through some paddy fields and empty land, in absolutely no hurry to get anywhere. Suddenly it turns sharply to the left and then soon after sharply to the right. Thereafter you swing wildly from left to right and right to left.

What could have possessed anyone to build such a crazy road when the distance to be covered as the crow flies is no more than a hundred metres?

The engineer and the entire road crew must have been drunk.

Or maybe it was deliberate, a thoughtful gesture to the many men known to stagger home drunkenly. The zigzag road, after all, naturally follows the path a drunkard would weave. If the road was straight, wouldn’t the poor fellow end up in a ditch? Wouldn’t he do himself some serious damage? Might not his poor wife end up widowed?

Might not the crooked road also reflect some very crooked thinking? A long winding road is likely to have a bigger budget and therefore a bigger cut for all those involved in building it.

Then again, maybe it’s just a way to bolster the statistics. How else can a small state end up with so many more miles of roads?

Whatever, it forces you to drive like a doddering old man in an ancient Fiat, so that you have all the time in the world to gaze about. Sometimes these lanes meander through a wild jungle of cashew trees, passing only the occasional dwelling. Sometimes through flat lands dotted with grazing cows, low hills in the distance. Sometimes through the hills themselves. It’s all very pretty. And a city type used to rushing about might never otherwise get a chance to simply relax and look at the scenery: at waterfalls in the monsoons, the sudden glimpses of sea, the green paddy fields. Sometimes you’re so busy looking at it all that you almost go off the road.

Where do these lanes go? Those that meander towards the coast inevitably hit some stretch of beach. The ones going into the interior climb into the hills or end in some little village unused to cars.

Rarely do you pass anyone on these winding lanes, other than an occasional bus.Yet the roads less travelled are there. And that makes all the difference.

The joy of the swimsuit

Are Indians the shyest people on earth?

Or is it simple prudery, the traditional taboo against showing skin, that makes a lot of Indians (particularly women) enter the sea fully-dressed?

Probably a bit of both.

Which is sad. Because surely there is a joyful sense of freedom in being unencumbered by too many clothes, in feeling the air and sun and sea on one’s bare skin: a freedom that only a swimsuit offers? In a swimsuit you are naked, and yet not naked.

But Indians tend to lack the natural unselfconsciousness that most foreigners have towards their bodies. A fat, aging, wrinkled woman in a bikini – completely unashamed of her body – is a common sight on the beach. But, generally, when Indians do wear swimsuits, they tend to do so only when they’re young and fit and can strut about with some confidence. I’ve seen fat ammas, in traditional nose rings, frolic in the sea, giggling and squealing like children. Wouldn't they enjoy themselves more without yards of sari hindering their every movement?

The sun worshippers glory in the human body, decorating it with tattoos, tanning it bronze in the hot sun, exhibiting it on the beach. And they do all of this with a natural grace and pride that is not usually evident in the rare Indian who wears a swimsuit.

To the villagers here, a blatant display of too much skin is a scandal, a cause for shame. Though the tourist in his or her skimpy clothes is welcomed with an oily smile, privately there is much censure of their “shameless” ways.

It’s a pity. There are places in the rest of the world where people hang out completely naked.

Indians don't have to go that far. All they need to do is shed their inhibitions along with their clothes - and enjoy the freedom of a swimsuit.

When storm clouds rage

Reading The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh makes you realise how truly blessed the Goans are.

In the Sundarbans, described by Ghosh so beautifully in this book, life is lived on the edge always. People are not only poor, but struggling eternally against the elements, particularly the tides that regularly inundate the many mangrove islands. As for cyclonic storms, never in Goa have they experienced anything quite like this:

The minutes crept by and the objects flying through the air grew steadily larger. Where first there had been only twigs, leaves and branches there were now whirling coconut palms and spinning tree trunks. Priya knew the gale had reached full force when she saw something that looked like a whole island hanging suspended above their heads: it was a large clump of mangroves, held together by the trees’ intertwined roots...

Then the noise of the storm deepened and another roar made itself heard, over the rumbling din of the gale: a noise like that of a cascading waterfall... Priya glimpsed something that looked like a wall, hurtling towards them, from downriver. It was as if a city block had suddenly begun to move: the river was like pavement, lying at its feet, while its crest reared high above, dwarfing the tallest trees. It was a tidal wave, sweeping in from the sea; everything in its path disappeared as it came thundering towards them... And then it was as if a dam had broken over their heads.

In The Hungry Tide it is the landscape of the Sundarbans, more than the human characters, which dominates: beautiful, threatening, destructive.

In Goa,during the monsoons the winds sometimes travel at such tremendous speeds that coconut palms and electricity poles come crashing to the ground. Any moment, you feel, your tiled roof will be hurled away in the storm. The rain is always accompanied by deafening thunder and lightning. This lightning doesn’t simple crackle across the sky, it tears open the skies with its fierce, terrifying light. At such times the sea comes alive like some ferocious, enraged beast frothing at the mouth. And the gaping sky, sundered by lightning, looks as if it will swallow the beast alive.

Yet, it’s absolutely nothing compared to the storms in the Sundarbans.

I must keep reminding myself of this when the south-west monsoon storms hit the coastline this year. Not that I think it will help.

Nice girls don’t

Prostitution, I’ve noticed, doesn’t seem to exist in any of the small villages in this area.

Which is curious, given that the oldest profession is said to exist everywhere. It also raises some interesting questions.

Does prostitution exist mostly in the anonymity of cities? Does it cater to villagers only when they migrate to cities, being lonely away from wives and families?

Is the community here so small and tightly-knit, with everyone loosely related or at least on nodding terms, that prostitution – unless it’s openly done - becomes impossible?

Is there a lot of premarital sex among young people?

Goan are so prosperous that I don’t believe even the poorest woman among them has need to sell her body. It’s true also that in the small and fairly middle-class community that exists here everyone knows everyone else; if a man desires anonymity, he’s unlikely to get it. But from what I’ve seen of Goans, I don’t think a woman who prostitutes herself would be ostracised. People here seem far too easygoing for that.

Yet, it’s odd because marriages here take place very late. A woman who’s still unmarried at thirty is fairly common. And I have rarely seen local courting couples. In the evenings, the young men all hang out together at some corner or are zooming around on motorcycles, the girls are at home. Or they are returning home from work.

And that’s another thing. Working girls. Many, many unmarried village girls go to work in the small shops of the market at Chaudi, in government offices and the odd factory. During the tourist season, the poorer among them get cleaning jobs. Others work in travel agencies and internet cafes.

Prostitution seems like a nasty business in comparison.

I think it doesn’t exist because the girls are simply not interested. Or would that be just too simplistic a reason?

Dedicated to god and vanity

It’s rather nice how many a village woman greets the new day with flowers.

First thing every morning, you’ll see her freshly-bathed, fresh fragrant flowers in her hair, plucking yet more flowers to offer the gods during her puja.

Ever so often a little girl walking to school will spy a rare rose growing over the wall of someone’s garden, and quickly she will steal it to tuck into her plait.

My neighbour, Nirmala, is absolutely mad about flowers. She has bushes of the tiny, fragrant white zai and mogra, as well as the little scented orange flowers locally known as aboli. Her husband, a woodcutter, can often be seen patiently plucking each tiny flower so that his plump beautiful wife, a mother of five grown children, can decorate her hair.

Nirmala would be astonished to learn that in seventeenth century Amsterdam, tulips were such a craze that people abandoned jobs, businesses and wives to become tulip growers, that tulips cost thousands of guilders, that tulip bulbs became a currency, their value quoted like stocks and shares. But to cost so much they must have smelt really beautiful, isn’t it? - I can imagine her asking.

Though village women value flowers for their fragrance and beauty, they see them also in purely functional terms. This means flowers are grown essentially to either adorn themselves or to offer to the gods. The idea that a flower could be grown only for the sake of its beauty is deeply mysterious to them.

But then it’s funny how flowers mean so many different things to so many different people and cultures.

Vincent Van Gogh found a sunflower lying in a gutter in Paris and created one of his most famous paintings as a result. In A House of Pomegranates, Oscar Wilde writes a poignant tale of a romantic nightingale who, for the sake of love, sings all night long with the thorn of a white rose piercing her breast in order to draw out, drop by drop, every bit of her blood to stain the rose red. As the pop song goes: Roses are red, my love.

Flowers and their colours are deeply symbolic, and many are considered to have a special spiritual significance. They represent birth and the cycle of life, youth, beauty, love and what not. They are used as funeral wreaths, to festoon marriage beds, to garland politicians. Some flowers are said to ward off the evil eye, others are said to bring good luck. To the flower children of the sixties, they were symbols of the desire for peace.

Here in the village, flowers are as simple as the villagers themselves.

Will the cow eat them? – is an important consideration while deciding which flower to plant. Do they need to be watered regularly? – is another. As a result you rarely find exotic flowers here. Mostly, they’re the ones that grow easily from cuttings, from the stalks that are trimmed and discarded during the monsoon. The traditional red and white hibiscus, yellow oleanders, bougainvillea, some sacred flowers used only in pujas, and the many fragrant flowers for the hair.

Buying flowers for someone you love is now a cliché. Not buying them can sometimes be more memorable, as in this poem by Wendy Cope:

Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.

The shop was closed. Or you had doubts –
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly.
You thought I might not want your flowers.

It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.

The dead dry leaves of summer

This is the season in which leaves fall a lot.

Mostly they’re dead, dry leaves: brown in colour or a pale sickly yellow. They don’t leave you with a sense of beauty, as do the glorious red and yellow autumn leaves you see in more temperate climes. These are leaves that must be swept up and burnt ritually every year.

Walking through an empty tract of land in which nothing but teak trees stand, I wade through a sea of dry, crackling teak leaves. They’re eaten up by insects, and many are no more than skeleton leaves, ghosts of their former greener selves. High above me, the tall teak trees bereft of their large, unwieldy leaves seem naked and forlorn against the sky. There is no green to enliven the eye: everywhere is the bleakness of a summer death.

Soon the villagers will come and gather these dead leaves, piling them into separate small mounds. And then they will burn each pile as if it were a funeral pyre of someone not much loved, who will be forgotten with ease.

I am reminded of a gloomy poem by Robert Frost:

All season long they were overhead, more lifted up than I.
To come to their final place in earth they had to pass me by.
All summer long I thought I heard them threatening under their breath.
And when they came it seemed with a will to carry me with them to death.

They spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf.
They tapped at my eyelids and touched my lips with an invitation to grief. . .

But, in another month or so, the rains will come and then these teak trees - which are as numerous as coconut palms in the landscape of Goa - will sprout green afresh. And everything will grow lush and green again.

And there will be a poem for that, too. A happier poem by Philip Larkin, a poet I really like.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Patrick, the faith healer

Faith in the mysterious – even miraculous - healing powers of an ordinary individual seems strange, even laughable, to those who don’t share it.

Patrick is a faith healer based in Goa, whom hundreds flock to everyday in the hope that he will cure them of their various ailments. ( I wrote about him briefly in an earlier post).

Are these people crazy? I used to think so, but now I'm not quite so certain. Crazily irrational, certainly, but most of all they are desperate. And perhaps only those who themselves have suffered as a result of some disease or other – which doctors and allopathic medicines could do nothing to alleviate - can understand this desperation.

I met a woman who, as a result of some dreadful injury, has been suffering from paralysis in one side of her face for the last fifteen-odd years. She has difficulty eating, and when she eats she drools in a way that has made eating in public a hugely embarrassing experience. As a result of meeting Patrick several times, she has some sensation at last in the dead side of her face and can eat without dripping saliva. Her faith in Patrick is immense. Every few months she goes to see him and she is convinced that she will soon be cured completely.

I met a man who had a hernia that required surgery. He told me Patrick healed him in one sitting. He also told me of an artist friend of his who had cancer of the liver. The doctors had told her she had six months to live. She went to see Patrick on two occasions. Subsequent medical tests showed no signs of the tumour. She was cured.

How does one account for this? Is there really such a thing as a miracle?

In one of his Unpopular Essays, Bertrand Russell writes that ‘there are a number of purely theoretical questions . . . which science is unable to answer, at any rate at present. Do we survive death in any sense, and if so, do we survive for a time or for ever? Can mind dominate matter, or does matter completely dominate mind . . .?’

Russell, of course, was not thinking of faith healers when he wrote this. And yet it is apt. He adds: ‘What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. . .’

Of course, the world is full of people who will believe every kind of mumbo-jumbo, to whom blind faith is everything, and who never use reason to think things through.

Yet, even I have had to admit that faith healing is a mystery. I don’t believe, and yet, how can I not believe perfectly decent people when they say they've been cured?

The demand for certainty, writes Russell, is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

Sometimes it’s important to have the humility to say: I don’t know.

I don’t know how a man’s hernia can disappear so miraculously, but apparently it did.

There are mysteries we don’t understand.

Maybe it’s the mind and body connection. The mind is a very powerful organ. A person's psychology is not something we should dismiss so easily. Can a man psych himself into getting cured?

I don’t know.

All I know is that allopathic doctors often can’t help, that allopathic medicines usually take care of only the symptom and not the cause, that faith in doctors (particularly specialists) is increasingly on the wane, and that people are desperate to get cured.

Why laugh at them?

(For those who are interested in meeting Patrick, the faith healer, I’ve managed to get hold of the phone number of someone who can tell you when he is available and where. The magic number in Goa is: 9226387931.)

Only the temple bell rings

Villagers don’t have doorbells. They don’t need them. They have dogs who bark when a stranger approaches the house. Everyone else simply walks in through the door, which is left open all hours of the day and closed only at night.

My doorbell has grown rusty from disuse.

Despite my urgings, nobody rings it, though some have pressed the switch simply for the novelty of hearing a bell ring inside.

It’s a bell, is it? a neighbour asked me in some wonder. But why do you need a bell? Don’t’ you hear the gate creak when someone enters?

At least she came in through the gate, unlike her son who once simply leapt over the wall and surprised me in my nightclothes.

Most people just stand at the gate and keep calling my name till I am forced to drop everything and pop my head out of a window to ask, in exasperation: What?

Most exasperating of all is Babuli, who some would call the village idiot.

Oye! - he’ll shout. And if you don’t respond in exactly thirty seconds, he’ll shout it again, louder still: Oye! And keep shouting the word till someone appears at the door.

I’m not one of your buffaloes, Babuli – once I told him crossly.

He looked abashed. But the next time he came round he was shouting it again: Oye!

Sometimes I miss the sound of the bell ringing in what was once my home in the city. I miss the way people used to stand patiently outside till you opened the door. I miss peeping through the peephole to see who it is. If the visitor is unwelcome, I miss most of all not answering the doorbell and watching the person quietly go away.

The politics of cheese and butter

Europeans on a shoestring budget come to Goa to live here temporarily, as once the English and Americans went to Europe.

In the first half of the twentieth century, people who were broke could live in Paris cheap. George Orwell was famously down and out in Paris (and London). A broke Ernest Hemingway lived in Paris, as did James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and others. Many also spent time in Italy, Spain, Germany. D H Lawrence lived in the Tuscany region of Italy.

Since Europe got expensive, even for its own citizens, those of modest means come to south Goa and live here for six months or so in a year. They’re not really tourists, more like people who like to holiday here and who supplement their finances by running shops and restaurants around the beaches of Palolem and Agonda. South Goa is much cheaper than north Goa. (Though I’m told the beaches of Gokarna in Karnataka are even cheaper.)

But now a certain section of environmentalists and Save Goa campaigners from the north are crying foul. Foreigners are overstaying, they allege. And they’re running restaurants illegally: sixty percent of all restaurant shacks along the beach are run by foreigners.

They’re demanding that cops take action.

What if they succeed?

How on earth, I want to cry, will I ever get a chance in this little village to eat a chicken escalope or a chicken schnitzel if they go? Where will I find a beef steak with blue cheese sauce, or the delicious wood-oven-baked pizza which an authentic Italian makes? Where will I get Hungarian Goulash and Spaghetti Carbonara and homemade liver pâté on toast, and the best bruschetta ever with olives and lots of herbs? Where else will I pay half of what I would in any up-market restaurant in an Indian metro?

And I want to cry: But what will happen if the nice cheese lady has to go? Where will I get my smoked Mozzarella and feta cheese, which she makes right here?

And what will happen to the locals who buy licences to run shacks from the Municipality, and then are only too happy to hand over the running of these shacks to the foreigners?

It’ll be as it always is when the tourist season is over. Making do with the bare necessities. And being thankful that I can at least buy Amul cheese and Amul butter while the season is on. When the foreigners go, even these little luxuries vanish from shops.

Village life murdabad.

Spellbound in Goa

If you look for Fonda on the map of Goa, you’re unlikely to find it.

This is because in Goa words are written in one way and pronounced in another. Fonda is actually Ponda. But this doesn’t mean that all words starting with a P are pronounced with an F. They aren’t. Palolem beach is still Palolem and Patnem beach Patnem.

But the M at the end of these words is silent. If you’re looking for Patnem, say Patnay. Palolem is Palolay, and Panjim Punjee. But Candolim remains Candolim.

The A or aah sound at the end of a word is also often suppressed. So if you stop to ask directions to Agonda beach, remember to say Agond. It makes you sound more like a local. Funnily, and also most aptly, Goa is pronounced with the aah! at the end. So you don’t ever say you’re going to Go, unless you’re really going to go.

And don’t even try to look for Kaypay on the map, as I was stupid enough to do. When finally I asked somebody where on earth I could find it, I was directed to Quepem.

They say most of these place names are a corruption of the original Indian term by the Portuguese.

The beach called Benaulim (the M is pronounced here!) in south Goa was originally Bana Halli, literally meaning a village created by an arrow. Halli, of course, is a Kannada word. According to legend the land of Bana Halli was reclaimed from the sea by Shiva when he shot an arrow into the ocean. The Portuguese didn't care too much to preserve the legend in the word.

But while the Portuguese mispronounced many words, very much as the English did in the rest of India, many Portuguese words themselves have entered the Konkani language in a way that would not be recognized by the former rulers today. The word susegad, which is often used to describe Goans, and which suggests a laid-back attitude, is a corruption of the Portuguese word soce gado, meaning exactly the same thing. Latin words were also once used frequently, and the educated Goan often strung together Konkani, Portuguese and Latin words all in one single sentence.

The Goans themselves were once called Goanese. But call a Goan a Goanese today, and you’re likely to meet with a very hostile reaction. Go and ease yourself, they’ll retort sharply.

This little politician went to market

Politicians are coming here with their big talk and smarmy smiles, begging for votes.

On Saturday evening, one of them stands on a makeshift stage in the only open area of the market, making his speech. Not many are listening. A scattering of individuals occupy the many empty chairs. Some curious passersby stop their scooters to look and listen.

Otherwise, the entire market ignores him.

Saturday is a bad day for a politician to visit. Didn’t anyone tell him that?

It’s the day workers are paid their weekly wages. It’s also the day the weekly vegetable bazaar is held. By evening, when prices have dropped and the day’s work is over, all the sad little shops so typical of a highway market town - and offering no more than the bare necessities - come ablaze with lights. The place is crowded as it never is otherwise – with migrants who work as masons, plumbers and laborers, with small businessmen of the area, with families from the many neighboring villages. All are busy stocking up on food and vegetables, fish and chicken.

Nobody has time to think of politicians. And for the moment, at least, no one is interested in the free rice this politician is probably promising. All are busy trying to find the best bargains for their own hard-earned money, hurrying from vendor to vendor, lugging heavy bags, dodging honking buses, trucks, scooters, cows and bicycles.

In any case, this market on the NH-17 is not a space where you linger to do some window-shopping. It’s easily the ugliest spot in all of Goa. The narrow highway doubles as the main street of the market and, together with an adjoining road constitutes the entire market, supplying the needs of all the villages in the district.

People do what they have to do and return in relief to their homes set amidst coconut palms, oblivious to the neta and his speech.

The poor little politician probably went wee! wee! wee! - all the way home.

Chronicle of a bird foretold

Tragedy struck yesterday at 4 pm, as I had long suspected it would.

The bulbul in my garden - whose song kept me enthralled for days - had found himself a mate and built a little nest, only to have the eggs destroyed yesterday afternoon.

I’m not a sentimentalist, not even an animal lover, but it’s hard to remain indifferent when you watch the courtship of a bird so closely, and then see violence done to it in your own garden.

I knew something had happened when I heard the little birds shrieking. I looked out of the window to see the two bulbuls in a frenzy, their feathers all ruffled and fluffed, frantically crying out while a greater coucal, that big sinister bird, was hopping about inside the zai bush where they have a nest. Slowly it slid out from among the leaves and flapped away, no doubt after having eaten whatever was in the nest. In a dog eat dog world, why should it be surprising that birds prey on each other?

The wailing bulbuls fluttered about the bush for a while. Then they perched on the horizontal rope that holds the madhavi-lata creeper, looking about them in a shocked kind of way, not making a sound. Perhaps it was grief.

I have not seen them since.

But the death was foretold in a harsh jungle law that says almost every baby garden bird must be killed, while eighty percent of adult garden birds must perish in their first or second year of life, long before their normal lifespan of four to fourteen years is over. A house sparrow can live up to 13 years, but almost never does. Who has ever seen a doddering old bird?

Large birds and sea birds tend to live longer. The sea eagle will often live twenty years. While the albatross, at 37, holds the record for the longest living bird.

Aristotle said that man is a rational being because he can calculate. Apparently, arithmetic in ancient Greece was impossibly difficult. Perhaps the birds are fortunate that they can’t count their dead. Their grief must be short-lived.

Funnily enough, birds in captivity are known to live to a ripe old age. A common Australian parrot who lived in a zoo died at eighty.

But does the caged bird sing?

And given a choice, would a bird rather be free and dead before its time? Or caged and alive?

Who can say. It’s something even we humans might ponder if we had such a choice.