Keep
a green tree in your
heart and perhaps the singing bird will come - Chinese Proverb (so says the
internet)
It’s the time when the city is at its
quietest and darkness is still heavy outside. A singular mellifluous eight-note
song of the fantail in the almond tree outside my bedroom window signals that
night is about to end and dawn break is not far away. And within the hour, a
cacophony of birsongs bursts forth every single day in the limited trees that
we have within our society compound.
In my arm-chair bird watching style, I have
counted just over 20 species of birds in the one mango and one almond tree that
dot my windows: from crows, sparrows, drongo, pigeons (dumb and forever
fornicating just like humans!) to copper-smith barbet, golden oreole, purple
rumped sunbird, common tailorbird, and even a single male paradise
flycatcher. It pains me sometimes to see
so many birds in just a few trees, each struggling to find its own space (crows
and pigeons mostly win). But somewhere I count myself fortunate to yet wake up
to birdsongs in a city before chaos takes over for the rest of the day.
This became all the more discernible when I
was travelling in Germany and Slovenia during fall last year. Though I missed
the ancient beech forests of Germany, the ones that I visited in both the
countries were second or third generation forests, carefully regenerated and
then ‘managed’ for ecological as well as economic sustainability. In Germany,
citizens have the right to walk inside any forest, private or public, but
within stipulated paths and trails. Different from India, I felt breathless and
lost in the beauty of these young forests: in myriad hues of yellow, orange,
red and green, in colours more heightened when the slanting autumn sun filtered
in through the transforming leaves, in forest floors layered with fallen
leaves, and in the pervasive silence everywhere. Coming from a country where noise
is the prime sensory overload, the silence of these forests was like going deep
in meditation. So absorbed was I in this other type of sensory overload, that I
did not immediately sense the forests were more silent than normal. Even in a
more rustic Slovenia, surrounded by craggy mountains and limpid lakes, the
forests were cruelly still. So were the trees in the cities and city-parks. The
singing birds did not come here despite the green trees.
 |
| morning mist in a forest in Slovenia |
Our cities, villages, parks, forests,
rivers, lakes, hills, mountains, salt-pans are alive, despite urbanisation:
insects, dragonflies, butterflies, snakes, frogs, birds, small and large
animals, fungus, algae…everywhere still. Our forests have an ephemeral silence
as well as a constant chatter, filled with a raw energy. This energy can still
be found scattered in pockets across the country, even though successive
governments have been changing policy to forcefully create plantations in the
name of forest ‘management’. The country’s
forest cover surprisingly remains the same: dense forests are cut down while plantations
(considered ‘forests’) take over its space. But then a time will come when our ‘forests’
will also become deathly silent.
Till that time, I am grateful for all the
singing birds in my green mango tree.
