The Bird, the Tree, the Monkey

The story begins on a cold, pale winter morning somewhere in northern India. It starts as a simple tale and then like all good stories grows up to become a fantastical allegory. Something you heard on your grandmother’s lap or in my case something that my youngest niece told me one hot, intense summer afternoon when she was 4 years old. It is not so much about where you heard the story but how and what about it you remember. And most importantly why it comes back from the unfathomable chambers of forgetfulness.

I see the reticent peacock, the benevolent fig tree and one defiant monkey and something like a story stirs in me. I say, but the story wasn’t about peacocks, or monkeys, or fig trees. And then the story in its entirety comes rushing back to me.

That is another magical thing about stories.

Postscript: The peacock in the first picture is a regular visitor to the rooftops where people leave it offerings of food grains. In part due to their religious beliefs and in part due to the peacock's beauty. But the same people think nothing of dumping their daily garbage in the small wild patch that the peacock calls his home.

The tree in the second picture is the Ficus benghalensis or Indian Fig or banyan tree, known as bargad (in Hindi), our national tree, destined to be chopped down in the not so distant future. For some human has claimed the spot where it grew for years as the site for his house. Not a word is mentioned about the countless species that will lose their home.

The monkey in the third picture was a lone male, most likely shunned by the monkey troop, and in desperate search for food. It eyed the vegetable grocers cart with little success and settled for a meal of stolen roti and  banyan leaves. The monkey too is revered in India but human's endless need for "space" is testing the limits of reverence.

This leads us to the reawakening of some other story, whether well-remembered or intentionally forgotten.

Passing by

It can happen at the oddest of places and time. You are crossing the Millennium Bridge contemplating Barceló’s art that you glimpsed at in a book at Tate Modern with your hands pulling up the coat collars in a vain attempt to battle the winds that rush across the Thames. Or you are in a Blue Line bus winding its way through Delhi’s summer traffic flipping the pages cyclostyled from a book on Weber’s essay “Politics as a vocation” contemplating the ‘iron cage’ of rational control with one eye looking out for the men and their usual antics in the buses of Delhi. Or with your chin resting in your cupped palms you stand at the balcony of the apartment in Vasant Kunj or Bandra or London on a wet and cloudy day. And then they pop in from nowhere.

Three girls walking briskly and speaking it seems all at once. Describing in less than the time it takes for them to overtake you the splendors that lie beyond the bridge across Thames. They move away even more rapidly than they speak. And you are left listening to their words. The child asks his mother a question. The din of Delhi’s traffic drowns half his words. Two of them “Dekho” and “Papa” stand out, and you look out of the window and see a man on his scooter with two kids, the boy standing in front and the girl sitting. And many years go by but still you wonder. The five of them rush across the street. One of the boys rides a bicycle that he has long since overgrown. Another, when he gets off his, has a slight limp in his right leg. Two of them seem destined to be friends for life. Or maybe in a few months they’ll all drift away. Or maybe you'll meet them again in pictures and articles while browsing the internet.

And so it happens. Frequently enough to not be merely dismissed as a coincidence. In fact, so often that you start to unconsciously look out for them even though you know the encounter will always be unexpected. And more rewarding and long lasting for precisely that reason.