By WL Hangshing
Looks like today is rain
Waiting for the raincoat
Hey ho to Cherra by train
Is it possible by boat?
The stillness in the air is punctuated by the sounds of birds. It is early morning. The drizzle-fizzle of the Shillong April morning has abated and it is all a light grey ambience. Only now and then is there a slight movement of the pine canopy as a gentle breeze passes by. It is “cool!” and one hardly misses the usual morning sunshine on the balcony of our house. It is heavenly. I asked my wife, who was inside at the breakfast-table, “D’you think you will get this scene in ‘swarg’?” She didn’t find it worth a response and instead wanted to know what I wanted for breakfast!
Glimmering rows of raindrops are clinging on like silver beads along the balcony railing as the morning sun tries hard to get through the layers of stratus clouds.
‘Tuhkolou’ is the name of a bird that has a call-sound just like its name, only repetitive. I’ve heard it ever since but never seen it, or rather, never put picture and sound together. I can only imagine what it looks like. It is a dominant sound today and getting more frantic by the minute.
The little warblers also sound angry. An intermittent screech of another bird is also loud and clear. Beneath the peaceful facade of the forest there seems to be aggression and even violence. It actually sounds like early morning Delhi. The birdlife must be bickering over parking space, a wrongly parked car blocking the way for the children to catch their school bus, a neighbour making too much noise, somebody shouting at somebody to walk the dog away from the front lawn, a neighbour has left too much garbage overnight, a wailing peddler audio-advertising his wares and so on. An orchestra of sounds! If one was a ‘bird-whisperer’ and understood the language of the forest life, one wonders…
Henrietta is of the same tribe as Henri D’mouse of Goa, though a much fatter and bigger version and looks more like a big squirrel. Her looks and physical features have, as obviously apparent, gone through changes due to the generations of racial-mix that her DNA has encountered. But actually if you ask me, it is the mucky fast-food from the kitchen that she and her litter had been indulging themselves in that is the cause of her change in shape and size. No longer the health-food regimen of cherries, fruits and nuts. She is on her sniffing round among the grove of banana trees, and nosing straight into the garbage of kitchen waste thrown across the fence.
Kitchen waste is a food source for the furry denizens of the forest just across. It is also bio-degradable and poses no environmental hazard. It is the plastic waste that is a permanent eye-sore, and as real as the noon-day sun and as certain as the afternoon-rain in Shillong from April onwards, plastics will eventually end up on top of nature unless a systematic way of disposal is devised.
It has started to pour. Rain has its language and in Shillong, the rain does fall in the language of the Khasi hills. It is true!
Though impervious to the noisy neighbourhood above, Henrietta is furtive and ever-alert. She never saw me until I moved to get my camera, and I never saw her after that. I shall click her some other time, and next time I will perhaps snap her swaying her rump to the tune of ‘catch me if you can’ before she disappears again into the undergrowth.
(The author is chief commissioner, GST & Customs, NE Region, Shillong)
