the old ventilator nest

a thousand palaces we may roam,

be it ever so humble... there's no place like home



recently we moved to a new address. my dad has a transferable job and the dead line to vacate was drawing mighty close. I am not very excited about the new place. attachment to the old lanes of the colony, my childhood fellow pranksters, the old house itself is driving me nuts. the new house is some 15 kms away but already I have visited my older address a dozen times no less. I just stand and stare. in holidays we have time to squander. so be it. the old house remains in shambles... It looks like a world war remnant. dirt covers the floor. A sense of emptiness had already started engulfing it long before we left . The old place was a government quarter. Over the ages, the bricks had turned black owing to the mosses. the veneer of paint had withered ...

I had a connection with the colony. though I studied in a boarding school, still some memories have cemented themselves in inaccessible recesses. cricket matches on the ground, the sparrow nest on the ventilator ( though I really never liked the chirping of the fledglings , much) , the staircase ( where we took to the nooks while playing hide and seek... where the bombs were exploded so that one particular uncle especially got annoyed... ),the wind which banged the windows and doors so much that my mother and me always feared that the day the doors and the windows gave in to the reckless wind ; we would be blown away... the mini-functions of republic and independence days where I never got any prizes for coming last ( I ain't any goddamn runner!!!)....

just some days back when the vacating date was 2 or 3 days due, I noticed that mom was clearing up the mess left over after destruction of a nest... I thought that the oldest nest on planet earth had finally succumbed to my mother's relentless frustration..." ahh if my old house goes, so does yours mrs. sparrow... "... I couldn't restrain myself from asking her as to how on earth could she do that...?? a nest can be plundered, ok...but the fledglings?? were they flung out of their nests to die a crashing death...?? my eyes were not in the mood of accepting a silent answer that day. I would be honest enough to admit two facts:

1) probably the first time I had felt that gloomy for anyone so inconspicuous from my life as the sparrows...

2) I had dared to think that of all the persons on earth, my mom could subject the birdies to such pillage.

mother just said , " a new nest should better be broken than seeing a full-fledged one vanish due to loneliness".

evidently a pair of mynas had managed to creep in through the crevices of the crashed window and had just started collecting twigs and straw etc... the ventilator guys had left... the nest lay abandoned. I am tempted to think that they had a premonition that we were about to leave the place... I have no scientific facts to back me but I am happy with my foolish conjecture. Science would take time to rob me of this joy... the pleasure I get from thinking that the sparrows couldn't stand us going...