Rewilding

The view from my window looks like something I read in a book by Ruskin Bond a long time ago. With the pandemic and the virus floating around everywhere, I haven’t been out in a million days and have taken to staring out of the window wistfully for long intervals of time. I’m not the kind of person who likes going out to begin with, so it’s obvious from all my cravings that I’m at the brink of descending into madness from being a shut-in. The hikikomori lifestyle that I’ve always idealized suddenly sounds painful with the lack of fresh air. But right now, the subject of my ramblings isn’t my fascination with being a social recluse but the tree I’ve been stalking from the past three months.

It’s a rather solitary tree with none other in it’s direct vicinity. We do have lots of trees in the neighbourhood but they’re farther apart from each other. Not breathing down each others necks or stealing air, living in isolation by themselves. But each tree apparently is a cornucopia of biodiversity. I’d never noticed this despite having spent every summer in the same room, looking through the same window.

The said tree stands across the street from our house, but I can touch the leaves if I reach out my hand through the window I observe it from. I couldn't tell you, for the life of me, what kind of a tree it is. I’ve always envied writers who can talk about botany so well. About how the peepal trees in their gardens are flourishing and saplings of various flowers sprouting. I can’t tell the difference between a deodar and a fir even if it smacked me in the face. 

But this tree is ancient in our neighbourhood. It has stood tall and strong for as long as I can remember. Bearing flowers near the end of winter and carpeting the street below, with its quaint blossoms that resemble the pale skirt of a pixie to me. But no pixies live on the tree, I’ve tree-watched for a long time to confirm this fact, or maybe they just awaken after the world falls asleep. Intimidated by the rambunctious squirrels and boisterous koyals that populate the tree.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been roused from sleep in the summers from the noisy cries of the koyals. Seeking their mates, preening and desperate for attention. The volume increases alarmingly when they receive no answering calls until they quiet down, fly away and try their luck in another place. Starting over their lives in the blink of an eye. I’ve watched tiny squirrels that’d fit in the palm of my hand, scampering around the branches and socializing, spreading gossip all around their small colonies.

The mynas with their bright beaks and bespectacled eyes in spectacular shades of yellow, always seem to sit elegantly in their perches, looking down at the world with their skeptical eyes.They seem distrustful as they pick their way through the dense foliage and twitter around.

The bulbuls are the most fierce looking of the lot, with their small stature and pointy crowns, they seem like they can take you down in a fight if you were foolish enough to challenge them. The splash of orange and red in perfect harmony on the cheek, marking them like war stripes and badges of courage.

The most delicate are these really tiny birds with their petite, spherical bodies. They have sharp, needle-like beaks probably adapted for sucking the life out of flowers, so vicious looking for their otherwise adorable anatomy.

I don’t know what they’re called and I’ve always assumed that they belonged to the family of plant-blood suckers, the hummingbirds. Quite easily scared away by a pair of crows that visit so often, always together at the same spot on the wall just past the tree. They’re best of friends, these birds. A pulchritudinous friendship, the kind they spin tales about.

They’re here near sundown, watching the street below quiet down and people withdraw from society. As the sky changes colours from blue to a bruised purple to night, they look upon the world with their wise, beady eyes. The tree quiets down too. Twilight brings in creatures of the night. Bats swoop in and demand their quiet. Everyday the tree wakes up with dawn and the cycle repeats over and over again.

 A lot has changed in our neighbourhood in the span of the last eighteen years. The tree has gotten older, spawned less fruit summer after summer and the streets no longer burn with the heady scent of its produce, with the progression of time. But over the span of the pandemic taking over the world, the activity around it has picked up to alarming levels. Like the dolphins that returned to reclaim their lost city in a faraway country from my tree, the birds have come back to rewild the tree that had grown tame under our care.To restore it back to its former glory.

(A/N: I rarely write non-fiction, especially not the kind I just penned down. But the tree has become such a big part of my day and I wanted to immortalize it in words so that each time my memory fades I have something to look back to. I’m terribly addicted to the flavours of nostalgia.) 

copyright ©️ 2020 Mnemoyne

(Yes, I took those leafy pictures all by myself. Aren't you proud of me? I'm sorry that I couldn't take pictures of all those birds and squirrels because I decided to take pictures way past summer and after the rains had started in full throttle.)