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I shudder to think of a world in which no birds sing. The terror I feel on imagining such a world is not just poetic but practical as well. If there is no gang of murderous sparrows to chirp just outside my window at the crack of dawn, then I’ll never be able to begin my day with a curse. I’ll never be able to experience the malicious pleasure that I feel in waking my mother up from her afternoon siesta for a cup of tea as the mournful notes of the doyel announce the approach of evening. And I’ll never be able to score a point in arguments against my sister by asking her offhand to recognize a birdsong, which I know she will not be able to identify. I might have to dispense with these joys soon if urban noise continues to force birds to shorten their notes. As the din from traffic rises, the city birds might just fall silent one day…
The prospect is frightening. I have always felt that the few patches of green left in the city and the fauna they shelter still make it worth living in Calcutta. The songs of birds are also their language, and listening intently to their tunes can indeed open up magic casements over the foam of perilous seas, as the nightingale’s song did to Keats. The horizons that a bird-song reveals to me are not always perilous, though. While certain notes transport me to the threshold between memory and forgetfulness, there are some that irk and amuse simultaneously.
My grandmother kept a pet cuckoo. Actually, she had been forced to keep the bird after it landed with an irreparably injured wing on our verandah. At the advent of every spring he sang in full-throated ease of the sorrows of captivity and fixed his wistful red eyes to the sky above. When he lay dead in his cage one day, I knew he had died of a broken heart.
Not all birds, however, can pour out their sorrows in lovely song, like the cuckoo. The bird that is the least fortunate in this regard is the crow. But I know of a crow that would have sung a melancholy song about thwarted aspiration, if it only had the voice. For, I am sure, that the crow wanted to bark like a dog. It never gave the usual ‘caw’ but went ‘kau-kau, kau-kau’. I sincerely appreciated its endeavour for some time before my patience ran out.
Then there are pigeons whose vocal capacities never fail to fascinate me. They seem to converse, conspire or quarrel in a tone that is almost human. Once I was attending a seminar in which professionals were giving lectures on how to build a successful career. During each pause in their enthusiastic counsel, a brood of pigeons roosting in some niche went ‘hmmm, hmmm’. I could not decide whether I should be more amused at the prospect of the marvellous opportunities supposedly awaiting me or by the pigeons that seemed to know better.
The bird I admire the most for its song is the humble doyel. I love the way its tail rises and falls in rhythm with its trill. In some way, doyels have got associated in my mind with dusk and with the rains. I have heard them singing unseen in the violet hour. They seem to usher in the night with their piercing, doleful cry. And, after every heavy shower, the sight of the lonely doyel perched on the moss-laden walls and singing plaintively in the emerald light of the freshly bathed foliage, seems to personify the monsoons for me.
The war-veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, imagined sparrows telling him in Greek that no death exists in a world in which god is love.
Though my prosaic ear is usually unable to discern such joyful tidings in the songs of birds, I am grateful for whatever strains I catch from the arboreal minstrels in the city. I believe that it is better to be deafened by the collective chatter of birds than by the “sound of horns and motors”. But, then, perhaps I need not worry. Poets from Keats to T.S Eliot have assured us that the inviolable voice of the bird is not meant for death. They will warble still when the grating city sounds cease altogether.