Watching gymnasts from my balcony
After eye surgery, I could not read. I was under treatment for hearing loss and could not listen to music. Knee problems ruled out going for walks. How do other 80-year-olds pass time? I was fed up. Bored to death.
Then one afternoon I lay down on a stone seat in our balcony, staring at the sky, while our rooms were being fumigated. A few feet from the top of my balcony was a maze of cable wires, each no thicker than half a centimetre, criss-crossing from one building to another. A small squirrel came balancing on a cable, gingerly testing its grip at each step, and proceeded from one building to the next. The ground was five floors down. One false step or slip, the squirrel would have come crashing down and died. I watched, fascinated, as the squirrel used its bushy tail for balancing itself while it made its way to a tree over the other balcony to nibble at some pods. It then scurried back, again along the overhead cable, to reach its original perch.
A little later a fat monkey came over on the adjacent terrace and tested the cable with a gesture that was so human I couldn’t help chuckling. As it made its way carefully along the cable, with a tiny baby monkey clutching its stomach upside down, a group of crows began to tease it. The monkey whipped round (on the cable, like a trapeze artiste!) and snarled at the birds which then flew away to safety, but returned immediately, to again raise a ruckus. One of the cables had an exposed end, dangling in the air midway, with wire sticking out. It could have killed the animal, but I noticed that the creatures left that wire alone—how do they know? What a show! I watched as the monkey made it slowly but safely to the other terrace, and realised that I had spent half an hour watching these goings-on without being aware of how time flew.
Sakuntala Narasimhan
Email: sakunara@gmail.com