Our regular guests made it this year too. April, that is the month they visit us every year. The lantern shaped hanging light in the front veranda, that is where they stay during their short visitation. They make themselves snug and cozy in their little space. I had often wondered how they made it without fail every year to the same spot in the same house. This year, when I was back from my convocation for my rather long vacation, there they were one warm afternoon, the red capped birdie family.
As always, they were littering our veranda with twigs and soft cushiony remnants, from god knows, which garbage can. Since Mom and Dad ardently believe in the sloka "athithi devo bhava", Dad did not care to complain about the guests being untidy and Mom did not bother to shoo them away while they made their own home in our house. So they began their yearly ritual of building their little neat nest in our hanging lamp.
The rest of the processes were really fast. Before we even noticed the nest was ready, probably the eggs were also laid and the mother birdie was always seen in there, making sure her eggs were warm enough to be hatched in time. I had always wanted to see the eggs, but since the nest is always perched on the hanging light and since I am a bit too tall by general standards, I could never make it and I did not want to take a chance, considering the fact that hard luck is very well favoring me these days, why unnecessarily get jinxed and end up a one eyed damsel (:P). And hitherto the eggs remain unseen.
Sometimes it seemed as if my family was more eager in seeing the eggs hatched. The birdies were seen near the nest less frequently now. Then one day we realized why the birdie was not to be seen most of the day, there was a small newborn birdie in there who was probably a voracious eater, the frequent trips made by his family suggested so. But the little fellow looked real cute, his pink skin, tiny beak, but the voice chords were, I guess, yet to develop. This time there was only one new birdie.
After a couple of days, there he was, perched on the tube light just adjacent to his hanging home. We couldn't simply stop admiring the young fellow. He looked even cuter that his parents and was sure,way fatter than either of them. At one point my strong eyes seemed to have lost focus after having watched the tiny being for so long. So I came back into the house, concentrated on other eye wasting tactics. Mom kept watching until the li'l birdie's parents were back home with his food and before she had even closed the door behind her, an eagle flew low and grabbed away our li'l guest. His parents simply kept watching. The eagle was almost ten times their size and maybe they knew that it was no point jostling someone who had already frozen his catch for the day. It was saddening, the news that Mummy brought. The small family never returned the rest of the day, looked like they had left for this year.
This was the first time our guests left unfulfilled. It felt bad. What if they left and never returned next year? My Dad always said that it could be the newborn birdies who came back the next year to visit us. Now the family has been bereaved. Looks like this will be the end of a long relationship. So true is the case of any relation, break that one binding force and there takes a plunge, the whole long chain into long lost history.
Or to wind up on a different note, let us put it in Darwin's way, what happened with the birdie family was just a case of "Survival of the Fittest". That could be a coequally good lesson to me too, ready to dive back into the corporate world for a second round. Guess there would be many others too who could keep this one in the back of their multi-network entangled minds. And so the li'l birdie spread music unheard, sweeter than that heard.
