A family feud is most dangerous. It shatters the members of a family more completely than any outside attack against the family. It affects their physical and mental well-being and the sensitive members suffer the most.
I have been living in our home that was near a temple pond. The compound was filled with different types of trees and it was the abode of many a bird. Jungle babblers, sunbirds and bulbuls used to build their nests in and around our home, and bring up their chicks.
I was extremely attached to the home, trees and birds. But as a result of our family feud, I lost my right to continue living in the home and I have been missing ever since the trees, plants and the birds that were everything to me. I used to spend hours observing the antics of kingfishers, golden orioles, magpie robins, treepies, woodpeckers and coucals.
Now my new home is being built. The finishing works are going on. The other day I was observing the backyard through the window of my bedroom upstairs and was surprised to see three woodpeckers pecking on the trunks of different trees.
A pair of sunbirds were searching for spiders among the twigs of the trees. A golden oriole was seen perching on the tree that was next to the coconut tree, on whose trunk one of the woodpeckers could be seen pecking.
The most wonderful sight was that of a rare bird—pitta. There is a bamboo cluster very near to the new home. I took special care not to destroy it. While I was ecstatically watching the top ends of the bamboos swinging around in the breeze, suddenly, a little bird with light green wings, brown chest and beautifully eyebrowed eyes came flying and perched on one of the bamboos—only two or three metres away from the window near which I was standing. The pitta was there for some minutes preening its plumage before it flew away.
Then a butterfly came gliding through the wind and started to drink nectar from the little flowers blooming in the creeper that climbed all over the mango tree near the compound wall.For the first time since I was forced to leave our home near the temple pond, I felt that I was not abandoned by my friends—the birds.
Again, as William Wordsworth says in his poem Lines Written in Early Spring, “To her fair works did Nature link/ The human soul that through me ran.”
Email: lscvsuku@gmail.com