The Beauty of a Rattle

Here's a bird, upward bound. Sometime last year, before the monsoon ravaged Bombay in one catharsis of downpour, I set out for a lark, with a perfect wet sky. I carried my camera along, after delicately brushing its lens.

When I was returning home, the light was 'dirty' as the sun burned and the clouds moved. I saw a crow sitting by a short fence, in another crow's company. I fished the camera out, set the aperture and shutter, looked around, and started closing in, in infinitesimally small steps, holding my breath, crouching, feeling limited by my 35 mm lens.

Nissim Ezekiel's words came on stage, in arresting whispers:

To force the pace and never to be still/ Is not the way of those who study birds/ Or women

I wanted the crows to flap away suddenly, so that I could freeze the wings with my shutter, to claim that beauty of sharp, sudden flight, that splash of dark feather in noontime sunlight.

I got closer. And closer. And it made me uneasy, because birds sense movement extremely well, and this crow should have sprung with a crude abruptness, to linger on a compound wall, to jerk his head this way and that, sly, suspicious of others, calculating margins, hopping towards a crumb or a piece of rat.

But he just sat there; so did his friend behind the fence. Were they both sick, or upset about something, what were they waiting for? I thought it might be an egg about to hatch.

I stopped crouching and stood up- and now I knew something was terribly wrong, and it was awful to just stand there, not knowing what to do. I wasn't sure whether to click or not. I didn't care about the lighting or the composition. I stood there, camera hanging limply from the shoulder, in awe of something I couldn't see, in a mist of silent crow-lamentation.

The first crow leaned to his side, now, now and now a little more, and he died. His friend stood there, without moving.

As a clouds moved, the sun glided along the slope, and the petals of dry vermillion emerged, like crusty drops of blood. The friend sat for a while longer, and then flapped away, to be lost in the trees, in a scatter of crow.

Death is around us, everywhere. We spend much of our lives, this mire of careers and investments, in fear of death and decay. We build walls against what grips us deep inside, the fear-haired spiders that crawl in the crumbled interiors of our minds. We are afraid of disorder. We are terribly, terribly afraid of time, of others doing at 21 what we did at 25, of the sudden gleam of grey hair in the mirror. Years into corporate life, executives suddenly begin to jog and gymn, abruptly, frantically, their newfound bellies flopping by the first streams of morning traffic, their thighs flopped on stationary bicycles, their wallets thinner for another EMI that they hope will delay- death. Entertainment too is perhaps just a shelter of blinking fluorescence, an indulged forgetting of the darkness.

J.Krishnamurti, in his last recorded discourse to himself, asks:

"How beautiful that leaf was, so simple in its death, so lively, so full of the beauty and vitality of the whole tree and the summer..." "Why can't we all die as naturally and beautifully as that leaf? Why do human beings die so miserably?"

I wish one could just fade away, or feel as a tree does when a leaf drops, or as the ocean does when the tide flings water over the rocks. I'm conditioned to believe I'm a person, one person, one name, one journey over a timeline starting at zero and ending at x. Our comparisons, our anxieties, are all along timelines.

Nature's filled with cycles of decay and renewal; the leopard clasps the bounding antelope's leg, bringing it down, reaching for the neck; leopards die too, because antelopes are often too quick. Lionesses stalk the grasslands, sniffing out cheetah cubs, ending their little stories with a thud of heavy paw lest they grow up to hunt their prey. The grasses rise, enriched by the guts of the lioness, to be devoured and chewed by the antelope's teeth, and the cycles go on; and if you get beyond physical, visual forms you are not sure where identities end and begin.

But it's one thing to seek survival, by instinct, and quite another to build walls around us, to immure ourselves in healthcare and insurance, and then wait, indoors, while steadily the vapours creep towards us, reaching out, getting into our arteries, forming clots in our brains, quaking our joints and mixing our memories.

I don't know what crows feel. If I could prepare myself for death, be it by age, or accidents, be it a whisper in peaceful slumber or a painful squealing of metal and burning tyres, then perhaps I would be free all my life.

Samurai warriors dealt simply with death- they believed, they knew, that they were dead already. They also spoke of the quality, the dignity of death, and not just death as an objective fact, a yes or no.

The body may live or die; instinct will certainly make us seek survival, as it must; but 'I' will have to die, not tomorrow or next year but now. If one is part of the tree, and the wings of martyred ants, and the setting sun and the kerosone fumes on a rickety steamer, then perhaps one knows the music of death, not the denial or the seeking, but just the music.

If we could be like leaves scattered at the tree's feet, fallen, decaying, composting for the next little seed that cloaks its tiny shoot and radicle, then we wouldn't worry about the cruelty of one leaf's end. Apart from the need to function, to remember, to know how to get home and flip a book's page, if we could lose ourselves and our notions of who we are in a cosmos of leaves and stars and particle-wave dilemmas, perhaps we'd be free and beautiful.