Being located by the riverside, and with the added advantage of a vantage point provided by a flat on a high rise, I continue to be a witness to the sights and sounds emanating from above and around the stretch of the Periyar river bounded on either side by thick foliage. There is and there always will be beauty and fascination in the natural and everyday rising and setting of the sun, the luminous sighting of Venus that goes by the sobriquet ‘Evening Star’ (and also ‘Morning Star’ when sighted in the morning)—which I have only very rarely not seen while I am here, the bright and distant twinkling stars donning the night sky, and of course the soft incandescence of the moon.
Another show equally beautiful and fascinating is meanwhile put on day after day by a series of manoeuvres and flight patterns executed by different species of avians both in the morning, soon after sunrise, as well as in the hazy twilight of the evening. As the sun sets, it is time for another actor in the ecosystem to show what it can do. This ‘actor’, shy and reticent, prefers to let its sounds ‘do the talking’. The actor here is the elusive, mottled wood owl known in these parts of Kerala as kalan kozhi. Kalan represents Yama, the Lord of Death while kozhi means fowl.
The quiet evening over the river is often pierced by the shrill and rather elaborate rants of ‘POOOO VAAA’ from a male kalan kozhi. This is matched rather poorly by a relatively less shrill and shorter ‘POO VA’ from its female counterpart. Folklore interprets these cries as suggestive of imminent death. The cries themselves are interpreted as a call meaning ‘let us go’ as is conveyed by the sound of ‘poova’ in Malayalam.
Being a bird that is nocturnal, elusive, rare and worse, producer of a sound akin to a sinister invitation to leave this world, has given to it an image that is both mysterious and demonic—making the poor creature a harbinger of evil and an ill omen.I remember my late grandmother, many years ago, hearing the shrill cry of a kalan kozhi whispering to us children that her time to depart had come. When she would find that her prophecy about herself had not come true, she would say, much to our amusement, that the creature had made a mistake and taken the ‘wrong file’.