Gooma…
Returning from a long journey, we stopped for breakfast at a run-down hotel in a small town on the Karnataka-Maharashtra border. It was a pleasant morning. Breakfast finished, my husband smoked a cigarette and we strolled in the rather spacious compound. On a low wall that bordered the garden sat three strikingly handsome cocks: one a wild mix of red, orange and greenish black; another a saffron yellow with a collar of furry gold; and the third a speckled black-and-white stunner with a velvety wattle. The birds knew they had admirers. Two of them flapped down to the ground and began to strut, like mannered fashion models and the third fellow set off a splendid round of music. It could have been the late morning warmth, or he might have had a ticklish throat: the crowing was all fun and falsetto.
As a young girl in our village, I used to hear the cocks crow early morning. It seemed wicked to even consider getting out of bed; so listening, I would sneak back into some bizarre dream until an unkind adult hand pulled back the blanket and got me up. Now that I live in a town, I hear the cocks so rarely; but I do hear them. In the darker, dingier bylanes of the congested town that is Lonavla, there is one family that rears the most wonderful country chickens. Some times, through the sound of traffic and the incessant noise of construction work, I hear him. Majestic, defiant and pure-throated, the bird seems to have adjusted to the aberrations of a bustling, small-town life. Here a cock can crow at noon and get away with it. Who listens, anyway?
We take something of our original selves, and our sins, everywhere we go.Early memories yield a reassuring and magical tapestry that is all yours and yours alone. Is it essential to care about such memories?
Six year ago we lived in the Annamalai hills of Tamil Nadu where I worked as a surgeon for a Tatas Group. One day I woke from a sort of feverish slumber and heard an owl. It was the unmistakeable, gentle ummmm-ummmm-ummmm of a variety of small-sized owls that lived high up in the thicket of bamboo near our house. From then on, every day, precisely at the same time, I would hear the bird.
There are no owls to listen to in Lonavla. I miss them. In my childhood we had a wider, wilder variety of them. The most majestic I have seen was large and white – as large as a cock, with a four-foot wing span. It was dusk, with barely a few moments of fading light left in the sky. This big white creature flew out the dark branches of a tree and skimmed just above our heads before flying away in an alarming rustle of her feathers.
Owls are said to hoot but that is just one variety of them and I've heard them too. You can track the course of the bird from the hoot, if you listen with some patience. I prefer the hum to the hoot though. Mmmmm…. In our Kodava dialect, we call the owl "Gooma." Just say "Gooma…" to yourself on a dark and lonely evening and you can conjure up ghosts, haunted castles and an old, toothless man with a lantern coming for you.
"Wise as an owl" is a western perception. It is those remarkable rings round the eyes that give him a wise and spectacled look. But here, we perhaps look at the neckless head. "Ullu ho thum," is an Indian way calling one stupid.
Wise, vulnerable, lonesome or scary, the owls are lovely birds. They are my favourite.
