Living in Delhi makes you quite used to seeing scruffy pigeon nests on the top of your air conditioner or anywhere else in the near vicinity of your room window (they don't live in trees anymore, reflecting the modern times). Pigeon poop is a popular nuisance that more often than not hits you on your head. Growing up in a middle class household, trying to oust pigeons from our house's balcony is something I'm used to.
About three weeks ago, a particularly fat pigeon gave birth to two little baby chicks right outside the window of my room (my mother almost died of the thought of handling more of the birds). All they did was sit in their thermocol nest in a pile of their own poop and look around (believe me, that's what their whole life is about. All pigeons do is flap around and sit and stare). Because of my attraction towards cute little things and because of my need to take a break from trigonometry, I used to track their growth almost everyday.
Momma pigeon was irritating at times when it pecked on my window while I was sleeping (they are curious little creatures, though). Eventually, without realising, I checked on them everyday. I used to tap on the window and watch them get scared, which was hilarious. I used to make funny noises so they would get all frenzied. But I used to check on them nonetheless.
Slowly, the baby pigeons grew up a little, their eyebrows still made of yellow feathers, and started tapping my window, their laughs forming a strange cacophony. Just a few days ago, I witnessed one of them trying to learn how to fly, which was a lesson in determination in itself. It used to flap it's wings with a frequency of about a hundred per second, but couldn't lift itself up. Later that day, I saw it fly a few centimetres, and it gave me a strange sense of happiness and wonder.
Unknowingly, I had starting seeing the birds as my pets, as my companions when I was alone in my room. All these revelations dawned on me today when, while checking on them, I witnessed that Momma Pigeon was lying flat on the nest, it's chest stock still, it's beak wide open. It wouldn't move even when I hit on the window (neither did its children, surprisingly).
Initially I thought, rather wished, that this was the way pigeons slept, but was later told that it was, undoubtedly, dead.
I never thought I would get tears in my eyes due to the death of an annoying pigeon, until today. Even though I saw them as a nuisance for the most part, I had gotten attached to them. And then I'm doing what I always do - relate this peculiar, extraordinarily ordinary experience with life.
Despite all the twist and turns and peaks and valleys and ups and downs of life, somewhere inside, all of us get attached to the idea of our life, to the idea of us surviving through the storm, however hard it may be. This is the hesitation that is born when you think of how useless your life is. Eventually, every thing you've done in life accumulates inside you to make you stronger and harder and prouder of yourself, because life's never easy and almost always unlucky. Those pigeons made me realise how I could love something I dislike, how everything is two-sided, and, in a state of natural human loneliness, we attach ourselves to ideas, more than things. To events, more than people. To an escape through imagination, more than reality.
I've probably studied too much math, haven't I?
