Nature’s Bounty is Here!

Every year when we make our customary summer trip to Orissa, I am amazed afresh with the wealth of nature’s bounty there. It is not an ostentatious or showy beauty that dazzles and craves for attention. Rather, it is just there, almost self-effacing, a mute and ennobling presence, that humbles even as it evokes pride.

Sometimes I feel that since eastern India is so rich in natural beauty, the people here are dressed plainly in subdued colours to offset it; in western India, Gujarat or Rajasthan, for instance, people need to be dressed in brightly coloured clothes because the landscape and hence, visual imagery is so dry and barren. Of course, it is a very subjective hypothesis.

To get back to the story without digressing… If you manage to stroll by the Kathjodi river, you find that water fowl frolic there in the afternoon and cranes glide lazily albeit majestically over the water. No whiteness on earth can match the pristine whiteness of their wings and slender necks. If you focus solely on the flapping of their wings and are also conscious about the chopping movement of the river underneath, you will feel almost transported over the waves by an optical illusion.

My Pisi’s house in Cuttack, where I have spent many a childhood afternoon, has a lush green compound. Here are two Kadamba trees, a jamun tree, two mango trees, an impressive neem , a verdant guava tree, a bela tree, and many coconut trees and banana trees. A certain kingfisher comes daily in the afternoon and sits on a particular thin branch of a neem tree here, at almost the same time. It happily sways along with the branches as the breeze passes through them. A couple of times, I have even spotted a Hoopoe bird strutting on the ground. Once I was lucky enough to see a rare Sunbird flitting in the foliage near the tank in the compound, its wings whirring like the blades of toy helicopters. I have heard a Coppersmith too but not spotted it. There are these robust magpie-robins that dart in and out of the branches of the neem as if playing hide and seek, and tiny, delicate blue-black Jays that serenade each other. Sometimes, I see some birds, whose names I do not know, that look like Swallows minus tails and fattened on a diet of cheese. They remind me of the portly nuns in the convent from “The Sound of Music” and it seems that they will just burst into full throated song. Once, a flash of mustard and flaming orange winged past briskly. And even as I stared in open mouthed wonder at this gorgeous beauty, it was gone…as quickly as it had come. Are there Birds-of Paradise in India?

When the river bed is quite dry with only patches of water dotting the parched earth, you see buffaloes wading in the water, heads sticking out, bodies glistening like those of well oiled wrestlers in the ring. Cattle egrets sometimes sit on them and do what nature ordained them to—peck at tiny insects on the backs of the buffaloes. (The river also has its moods. It sparkles silver in the morning sunlight, glows golden in the afternoon, mellows down somnolently to a grey blue in the evenings. Steel grey shadows flit through the water when clouds or a flock of birds are passing overhead ).

At Aja’s home in Bhubaneshwar, matronly pigeons (of all shapes and sizes), slender doves, homely and ebullient little sparrows, sprightly mynahs, shrewd parrots, elf-like squirrels and raucous crows often peep in from the window to say ‘hello’. Spiders continue weaving their gossamer threads (dreams?) oblivious to all else. Grasshoppers and merry crickets do a langorous, summer afternoon waltz near the flower beds. Butterflies, with gossamer wings as thin as dried peepul tree leaves are other regulars. Invisible koels pour their mellifluous notes into the otherwise quiet afternoon air. With the rains, peacocks will also come to express their joy of living and to add to yours. But even now, their lonesome cries rent the air in the evenings.

At my in laws’ house, on the branches of a distant Krushnachuda tree, I spot another bird, whose name I don’t know, peeping out saucily from behind a flaming vermillion flower, and I rue the fact that I do not know who she is. A golden brown mongoose with her babies trooping behind her in fine array frequents the low shrubs. Not to forget the occasional dog that strays onto the lawns, has a siesta or a fiesta as the case may be; sometimes, a troop of monkeys, babies et al that seem to be replicating our lives in all their domestic detail.

Nature’s bounty is here! Spring is in the air!!