WHEN PARADISE CONDESCENDED

I wanted to write this story in February, but was too busy with my lectures. The provocation for writing it now is an incident that happened on the terrace of our home just the other day. I was sitting lazily on my easy-chair; so lazily that I was not even watching the TV. Suddenly a brown coloured bird with a fairly long tail appeared on the Rambutan tree whose branches have grown over the terrace. I had never seen this species earlier. In my curiosity I tried to rise from the chair to get a better glimpse of this avian guest. I am sad that I could not watch it for more than a few seconds as four or five crows came flying and almost landed on the hapless outsider. With the surrounding warriors making high decibel spooky caw, the frightened alien flew away for its life and was not seen again. My mind flew back to February 2020; but did not stop there. It flew much more back into the past.

1995 - That was the year we moved to our then newly built home. The place is Annankunnu (squirrel mount). The CMS college campus is spread over the Annankunnu with a small forest on the south-east of it. The pond within the forest does not dry up even during summers and the college never has to worry about water shortage. People say that oxygen needs of the town is met by this forest. Our home is to the immediate east of this forest and we receive round the clock copious supply of fresh air. This is much more than what a town dweller can dream of. When we moved into our new home we were surprised not just by the freshness of the air but by the serene music in it too. The confluence of all those notes of nature in the air by a variety of birds resulted in a symphony so mellifluous. All these, in a small sublime island within the din and bustle of a town. I like to call this place the Squirrel Valley.

The fact that we had moved in to this isolated (read abandoned) part of Kottayam from a concrete jungle added to the lustre of our new experience. With time we settled down to life as usual, with realities overshadowing the nuances however aesthetic they were. We hardly noticed the dwindling avian population. It was only after over ten years of life in this valley that we realised that there were no birds left there. Not even the common crow was there! Watching the surroundings with a huge sense of loss we realised that the butterflies and honey bees too were missing. Lamenting for quite some time, it was again life as usual.

After a few more years one day I spotted a crane in the marshy open space in the valley, standing on one leg with its characteristic concentration. Within a week I found a few more of them, all in ascetic concentration. With a hundred of them in the next few days I started dreaming of the return of the good old days. Yet, why only cranes; not even a crow? The thought was disturbing; but as usual life moved on.

One or two years later. One early morning I woke up to a high sone chirping sound of sparrows. I peeped through the window and was pleasantly surprised to see a spate of sparrows on the nutmeg tree. God, are You giving those marvels back! Yes, all those missing darlings have come back. We now see a wide spectrum (in colour as well as variety) of birds; from sparrow to kingfishers to woodpeckers. The butterflies are back. But where are those honey bees?

One fine morning during the second week of February. I was having my Daily Bread, reading  'The Hind ' Daily (a habit of over forty years now). I noticed Susan entering the drawing room from the veranda and then walking up to me stealthily, signalling not to make any sound. She waved and urged me to come to the drawing room. I obliged and walked to the window to where she pointed. She pulled the curtain aside a bit and whispered into my ear to look out. Oh God, what a spectacle? On the nutmeg tree was a bird, the kind of which I had never seen before. The body was slightly bigger than that of a sparrow. White, pure white, nothing whiter than that. The head black, nothing more black. And most prominently this sparrow sized little one had a super-white tail some twenty inches long! I thought I was watching the most beautiful thing in the world. My slim vocabulary does not

suffice to describe even a fraction of its beauty.

For the next several days we had this nature’s splendour visiting the nutmeg tree in the morning. We kept watching from behind the curtain with great care to make no noise. We even modulated our breath. During this surreptitious operation, we noticed several things. The bird will come in a flash and land on the nutmeg tree. Within no time some fifty odd sparrows will appear from nowhere. During the one or two minutes that followed the scene had a set pattern. The bird would busily hop from one branch to another while the sparrows kept dancing and singing in ecstasy as if overwhelmed by the beauty of the VIP guest. Another strange thing was the presence of a greater coucal (Uppan) every time the bird appeared. The greater coucal kept walking up and down on the boundary wall completely detached from the celebrations on the tree. The bird would remain on the tree for one or two minutes and fly away. The sparrows and the greater coucal too would disappear. This kept happening for about two weeks.

My curiosity surrounding this mysterious bird kept increasing. I decided to consult my ornithologist friend Dr. John George. Even as I started my description he told me that this was the Paradise Fly Catcher. It is the most beautiful bird on earth. It adorns the cover page of "The Book of Indian Birds" by Salim Ali. Dr. John George was surprised to learn that it had been visiting our place for about two weeks. Usually it remains at a place for not more than four days. He said that it is seen in the Himalayan valley. A lot of them are found in Himachal Pradesh. During severe winter they move south, but flying beyond the Vindhyas and reaching as south as Kerala is very unusual. We consider ourselves lucky that we could see this epitome of beauty everyday for two weeks.

I talked to many people to find out a reason for the return of all those birds. In the opinion of my friend Dr Sreekanta Kurup (Kuruppachan), which appears to be the most plausible one, the issue was linked to the mobile phone towers. It was during the early years of this century that we saw a proliferation of them and surprisingly that was the time when the count of birds in the valley started dwindling. Then, I am told, as per instructions from the central government, the power of transmission was reduced considerably towards the end of the first decade of the century. So that was the reason?

One thing is sure. Human intervention is the most dangerous factor disturbing the rythm of nature. With the world staring with scare at the pandemic and its aftermath, there are certain things that offer hope for the future. With the lock down now into its third month and with human activities affecting the nature down to naught, I find at least three times the number of sparrows on the nutmeg tree.