Stray Feathers

“I haven’t slept enough…”

2007-09-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

“The Quality of Sleep…”, he could have very well said
But chose instead to have “mercy” read –
Shakespeare knew that mercy counts
When Damocles blithely threatens in this world so oft
But little did he know of the world’s bounds
And thus, why it does not let me sleep, nor does it Lara Croft?

There was the boy who ran hither and thither
And there was another who cursed himself to wed and wither
And along came the third - he blew me away, as a wind could the feather,
Alas! He flew instead, and me? Groping for him in nebulous aether!
And now you hear me in constant refrain,
“I haven’t slept enough, nor in six months have I lain…”

My loins burn, so does my heart
But whom do I tell, when I am everyone’s burden cart?
Neither shall I let weed devour me, nor from reel sagas shall I part
But tell me, old friend, why should I sit quiet and hold on to that obscene fart?
And so you hear me in constant refrain,
“I haven’t slept enough, nor in six months have I lain…”

There was a time in slumberland, when swords were drawn -
A bloated Amartya Sen indulging in paterabuse, branding me a “daft prawn”!!
I remember, old friend, your clear laugh, and those of others, at this feat of brain over brawn
But did you hug me, nay, stop for me, when all was but the bruise of a single thorn?
And so you hear me in constant refrain,
“I haven’t slept enough, nor in six months have I lain…”

O Censorious mind, of you I take fright!
O Judgmental mind, of you I have deep dislike!
O abusive kind, you make me strangely distraite!
O ‘clutchy’ kind, you shake me by the grip of your might!
Away, I say, all ones of your kinds, begone!
And let me sleep - its time for the blinds to be drawn.
And so from now there may be no refrain
That “I neither slept, nor in six months have I lain…”

16.xii.2006

Cicada and Circe

2006-11-09T07:04:00.000-08:00

Ides of May are the Cicada’s realm.
Countless. Myriad. Infinity.
Beating Wings. abdominal Wings,
Drumming. Calling. Screaming.
Interesting.
Distracting.
Abominable.
Claustrophobic.
Unquiet woods, Any tree
Emanate a plebeian pitch
A frenzy of febrile Mating Calls.
Evening skies of later May darken with
Cavalcades of Capricious Clouds
Rain torrents, torments….
Circean blows, empty shells and a liberating silence.
Metamorphosed and Dead
After a seventeen-year wait.
Fulfilled?
Unfulfilled?!

2003

Shore and Tide

2006-11-09T07:01:00.000-08:00

Sleep well, little baby
There may not be morning again
Home is stolen, and soggy
Far from your sister and father and everybody

The palms, drowned,
and paddies, shattered, in disdain
the fish serenade, dead,
in the vast blackness of today -
the harvest of sorrow burns me…but you are safe.
Sleep well, little baby, I will not leave you to God’s grace
And yet….the slow tears of eternity stare at me from your face

January 2005

Will-O’-the-Wisp

2006-11-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

the hills beckon me
today
their alluring blue contours intimate in me a grand emptiness.
Of calm winds and steady reams of transparent rain.
Of looking down on clouds and walking through them.
Of a verdant silent valley and dark flowing waters.
Of chiaroscuro games of trees and clouds and grass.
Of neo-natal pleasures and the Cicada's unforgiving cry.
Of cold nights in solitude and warm nights in companionship.
Of surreptitious glances and stolen stares.
Of unsaid words, choked responses and a withheld confession.
Of cautious tread and glancing strokes.
Of an impassive face; or misread, unread stray thoughts, betrayed in silence?
Of vibrant, violent frissons of feeling and unsullied sentiment.
Of original prospect and final sin.
Of silent days and silent flows of heart and mind;
I await Destiny.
And “as justice flows in an everlasting stream”,
I wait.
I wait…….

August-September 2003

Interlude at Agumbe

2006-07-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

I learnt a new word. Vertiginous. And I was slowly savouring the meaning. After dissecting the word. On an old teak armchair of the Raj Era. In a moss-walled, tiled house of this Era under assault by unrelenting precipitation. Under a tiled canopy shadowed by unruly festoons of wonderous red and yellow blossoms of the clock vine. Unruly after swirling in successive sweeps of monsoon fury. And deep in the folds of vegetation, fighting the batter of wind and rain was a precariously placed (as it now appeared) nest of a pair of ruby-throated bulbuls. With two naked chicks inside. They were my teachers. Rather, in a curious manner they were like a time machine of sorts. The parent birds appeared agitated, stretching their usually demure, low-key notes into a rather unsettling acoustic performance with a stream of affronted, unsteady and interrupted gurgles. The chicks look frightened. I go back four years.

I look away from the birds and pick up my umbrella. I walk into the rain. And walk across the short path to the pond. The agitation on the water surface is evident, and necessary, with thick raindrops falling across in constantly mutating lines and curves. The lily leaves in the pond alternate between drowning and floating. I walk back to the house. The birds are as agitated as before. I go in. It was four years ago. And I was in the Nilgiris, near Ooty. And it was raining. I was snug by a logfire with S. We had just made love and I was, as it was usual, whispering nonsense about the rejuvenating rains. He appeared nonplussed.

S: “Rains wash away things”

T: “Yes, but rains bring new life”

S: “Rains reopen old wounds and create new ones”

T: “Well, some mud is lost here and there, but all that goes elsewhere…”

S: “This is more than mud Teju, its me…”

T: “What do you mean?”

S: “I have cancer”

Vertiginous. It was rather so. I defocused as I did when I once saw a solitary beautiful mauve peony along a steep, windy precipice in the Himalayas. It could have been blown away anytime.

I boil water for coffee. I can hear the birds still. And I will hate Hitchcock forever for making that film, and Daphne du Maurier for writing the story. Birds are *not* crazy creatures. They are under your mercy and mine, and of the rains. There is a sudden, miraculous pause in the rain. A thick streaming fog envelopes everything. It begins to rain again.

It is early evening. The rains have temporarily relented once more. Times are rather difficult to discern at Agumbe during the rains. It rains come 12 O’ clock, come 6 and 12 again. A tiring night drive had installed us at the house, which at some distance from the town itself, and enveloped constantly by the rainforest and the monsoon darkness. My brother was promptly claimed by slumberland. I was left in solitary splendour to revel in the sensuous rains. But the rains aren’t as generous as I had hoped. And the birds soon distracted me. And its now evening. I plan to trek the next day in the nearby forest. But I’m running a temperature and coughing rather badly. I begin to harbour flickers of faith in bird premonitions. I decide to test the waters and take a short walk. The orchids are in flower. The opulent to the minute, densely crowded to retiring, ebullient and inviting – orchids abound in the rainforest. Balsams abound. There must be a few species of either waiting to be described someplace. It was in the Nilgiris that I had come across some strange balsams that I thought were new, and had sent preserved specimens of the plants, and photographs, to the Kew Botanical Gardens, for identification. The 5 pounds fee per identification notwithstanding, they were all returned with polite comments on the lack of novelty. I was rather dejected.

S: “Well, you can’t like them less if they aren’t new”

T: “But they aren’t, and that’s sad”

S: “Why should it be sad? I’m not new”

T: “Now, you have nothing to do with this…”

And in fact he did. He is now like the balsams, in photographs. Not new, but there. Immortalized on film. Not new, but unique. And he’s dead. Just like the balsams.

I conjure rather tasty pumpkin gravy, cooked in curd, and we have it with hot boiled rice. The rain pours with reinforced venom through the night. I’m not very much better the next morning and we decide to cancel the trek and stay mostly indoors. I have a choice of books with me – The Magic Mountain, a rather scholarly book on the Ramayana in southeast Asia, and Kawabata’s “The Sound of the Mountain”. But I can’t bring myself to read. It’s the rain. It’s distractingly distracting. I try to sing and out comes a croak! I go back to watching the birds. The tenuous nest is still around and the chicks alive and well, innocuous and flustered. The parents are calmer. The rain much less vigorous.

S: “I can’t, it’s just not possible. I have to go, and you’ve got to let go…”

T: “But how can you let go? I can’t. You can’t…”

S: “Look, I know there isn’t much hope…no point in prolonging it…please”

I let go.

Gay Biology #2 - Scent of a Man

2006-01-22T00:06:00.000-08:00

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." – J. B. S. Haldane

One gay man sniffs out another…well, at least another man. Truly, Madly, Deeply. *sniffs eagerly* No scents, though *sniff of despair*…but it is so, insist a few researchers from the prestigious Karolinska institute in Sweden. In a very interesting study published in May 2005, they have attempted to show what we always knew – smells do matter; they are as important as turn-ons as turn-offs (the lab is suffused with a miasma – malodorous armpits of a particularly pesky project assistant, who has just walked in after a game of football…bah! What can’t be cured has to be endured!). Simply put, the brains of gay men, particularly an important area called the hypothalamus, respond to testosterone-derived chemicals in a manner similar to the brains of heterosexual women. Straight men responded to estrogen-derived chemicals, but the study strangely precluded any mention of lesbians and chemical effects on their brains thereof. These “putative pheromones” are, in fact, products of the body’s metabolism generated by gender-specific processes. This study purportedly supports a decade-old study that highlighted the differences in the hypothalamus of gay and straight men (unfortunately, not available free online).

So it has been my experience too. I used to love (and am still haunted by) the odours of S. I remember how he smelt where (sheesh! Its rather embarrassing writing all this!)…I was powerfully attracted by the smells of K. & V. But the attraction that way was not overtly manifest *grin* - one doesn’t go sniffing on streets! It’s subtle. Very subtle. Only when one reads such articles do things get magnified. I have a very good memory for smells. Until two years ago, I used to identify books by the publisher as each (I felt then) had a characteristic smell – I’m not so sure nowadays. But I am digressing. I‘d really like to know how our olfactory system recognizes these odours, ‘coz it is believed that we have lost critical genes responsible for “odour receptors” as we evolved to become humans today. It is supposed that vision took precedence over smell. It is also true that our brains might respond stereo-dimensionally to smell as we do to vision, but we may be impaired by a certain degree of loss of the olfactory sense (as opposed to other mammals like, for instance, dogs) – how do I locate the scent of an attractive man in a party of a hundred people? I most probably don’t. I look for him. I may smell him (unconsciously…hmm, or rather, subconsciously!) but that would be likely once I get close to him. He might smell me. If he’s gay, he’ll respond (visually and ‘olfactorily’) positively if he finds me attractive and then…but if he were straight, he’d respond (only visually) to shoo me away, if it becomes painfully obvious that I’m hitting at him! But what else do we do? We generously douse ourselves with parfum and sprays of all description. These artifices should be affecting our olfactory perception of natural chemical attractants. They mask our true selves (No, I’m no “natural-smells-always” person, I’m as guilty as the rest when it comes to this…but it isn’t too trying to be the devil quoting scripture, is it ;-) )…and perhaps our problems with finding the right partners may involve some smelly reason! But we are a very visual species and…hmm…what else is left to say than to repeat the great biologist Haldane’s words, this time in the literal sense in what he probably meant – without gay connotations.

Gay Biology # 1

2005-10-28T01:03:00.000-07:00

Two fruit flies in a mating chamber. A Male (Male 1) and A Female. The male, with much discourtesy, begins to zip around the female in a weird manner (The Courtship Dance) – wings in rapid motion and body cirumambulating the Female, proboscis feeling…Ahem. Enter Male 2. The mating chamber gets crowded, after all it’s just a tiny 3” by 3” glass cuboid with a large depression in the centre for the flies…Male 2 begins a mating dance but seems to shower all attention on Male 1 whoz in it for Female – circling the male, touching, attempting copulation…I turn around excited, and call my classmates to watch. They feign disinterest. They feign anger. They feign preoccupation with measuring fruit fly pupation heights. My prof. gives a big lecture on “the un-natural and evolutionarily fatal act of homosexuality”. I fume with perfumed thoughts of him in Yama’s Purgatory. My gayness is fly gayness. The male fly wants to mate with another male fly. I want to mate with another human male. Period. The prof. knows that of course, but indefatigably tries to ‘counsel’ me - dropping hints about psychiatrists and the like. He doesn’t like it that I am gay and that I can do better than all his favoured straight chelas. Them, straight? I can give a million reasons why one shouldn’t use “straight” for a bunch of bigots, liars and basically crappy people who may incidentally like to sleep with women in their phantasy world. AND He wants ME as a STRAIGHT chela. Doesn’t help me that The Prof. was dad’s classmate thirty years back. I am told that the raison d’état that I should turn straight is that my dad has a PhD in reproductive biology and my mother has a PhD in socio-economic history! What more can I say!

I introduce another male (Male 3) into the mating chamber. Male 3 unfortunately seems to be confused. Dances in turns around Male 1, Male 2 or Female. Enter the Bisexual. Exit rationality. Well, we know that there are gay people and straight people, gay flies and straight flies. But bisexual flies and bisexual people? I suddenly notice that the chamber was really crowded and there was very little room for free movement. I transfer the flies into a slightly bigger chamber. Now we have gay flies, straight flies and no bisexual fly! This was what got me thinking. Are bisexual flies Pretenders? Or are they just confused in the heady pheromone cocktail in the miasmal mating chamber? Ditto for bisexual people. You’re either straight or gay. No in-betweens. Doesn’t make sense to me, neither does the gradation “index” of gayness or straightness. Male 3 now was happily carousing around Males 1 and 2. Wondered why there were so many gay flies in here together. Ran up to the department’s Drosophila stock centre where you have all the different varieties, or “mutants” as they are called, of fruit flies. Each mutant is supposed to be genetically different from an arbitrary standard model fly called the “Oregon-K” strain (Oregon for where they were first collected from, ‘K’ is the designated ID alphabet for the strain). Which means that somewhere in the “mutant”, the DNA configuration is ever so slightly different from the “standard” and this disparity is sufficient to make up for differences in appearance (different parts of the fly can show variation, for instance, eye colour), or behaviour (the Dance). So my flies it seems came from a mutant stock, say “X”. Simple questions as to where the stock was procured from etc got me on the net flybase (the fly gene database) searching for flies which were known to be gay. And Voilà! “X” strain is known to carry a gene that supposedly made the flies “gay”. The gay gene, as it is called, when mutated causes “mating preference alterations” leading to “attempts of same-sex copulation”…he he he…it was rather funny reading all that crap written in formal scientific language, in a rather prestigious science journal. But it is probably true that there is a genetic basis for homosexuality. This does not mean, of course, that there is one gay gene that controls a switch on whether flies or people are made gay or straight. It is not like the well-known genetic switch that controls sex/gender during foetal development. The ‘switch’, if there is one, is likely to be a combination switch for genetic (yet incompletely unravelled), hormonal (during puberty or before, the womb), developmental (as a foetus, interacting with maternal supplies that may include influential hormones and drugs) and/or environmental (too many to list…) keys. We probably have a long way to go before we have a decent understanding of the works. I’m not sure whether we are born gay or straight or we become gay or straight after attaining puberty but most certainly, it is then that we realise that we are gay or otherwise, isn’t it?

One point I grant my prof. That homosexuality is an evolutionary dead end. Evolution, as I understand, works on the principle of begetting. And in natural populations of wild organisms, if you are gay, you don’t beget (big assumption, I know, but read on…). If you don’t beget, then you as an individual don’t contribute to variation, which makes you unconcerned with the screen of natural selection - no natural selection, no evolutionary future. Evolutionarily or otherwise speaking, you can’t have gay species. It doesn’t make sense. But how do you explain gay flies then? Well, gay flies form a tiny percentage of the flies born in every generation. They are born in every generation due to mutations in a gene that ‘normally’ suppresses any ‘untoward’ behaviour. This tiny percentage is due to the statistical chances of that gene having undergone a random change or ‘mutation’ in its DNA configuration. This is also why we have gay lions and gay chimps. Of course, there is no study that shows that gay flies don’t procreate. It’s a straight assumption of straight researchers which has not been backed up by proof. But in humans on the other hand, homosexuality has been known for eons (won’ go into that now!). Most gay people are married and have kids. It would be interesting to know the statistics of how many (if many) gay people beget gay children and other permutations and corollaries of that question. That could also explain why the estimated percentage of homosexuals in any given human population is so much percentage I have not come across reliable studies on this, but it would be really interesting in the context of homosexuality having a genetic basis or something more than that alone. I would really pity the researcher who attempts such a study, considering the difficulties he/she would have to face! It would be something like Sisyphus rolling up his rock!

Post-script: the incident of the gay fly took place when I was doing my M.Sc. in Zoology.

I remember...

2005-10-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

The field mouse was out early to feast on ripened paddy grains, plentiful, golden and lustrous fields of which were spread as far as the eye could see as one got off the train at Hampapura in late December. But that was perhaps never in the mouse’s field of view. What it could probably see, however, were ‘tall’ stands of rice plants in different shades of ripening, and a narrow bund of mud, one of the hundreds that criss-cross these vast fields in regular squares, dividing them into plots of a certain approximately-fixed area. The mouse, no doubt, had to negotiate this maze everyday. A maze fraught with dangers.

The mouse also probably had to jump down, at regular intervals, certain bunds which suddenly gave way to fields at a lower level, as the land on which the fields stood gently sloped from Hampapura to the floodplains of the Kaveri river. It would also have wandered into the shallow wet marshes that lay beyond the cultivation, but then, in course of its wanderings, the mouse could have encountered other denizens of the neighbourhood; other mice, frogs, fidgety grasshoppers, pretty butterflies and gaudy dragonflies, ubiquitous paddy birds, grey herons, mynas, weavers and snipe, and sometimes, perhaps, the harrier. Now and then, the harrier rises grandly from the lower marshes…the chase is on through the wet paddies. A swift skirmish sometimes results in a harrier with a contented stomach. Sometimes, the mouse gets away. And the harrier is left seated on a stone, or on an elevated bund, to survey the endless expanses of paddy and the extensive marshes of the Kaveri that form the great Paradise marsh of Hampapura.

The Hampapura marsh exists for two to three or four months in a year, depending on the post-monsoon water levels at the Krishnarajasagar reservoir near Mysore. It is created de novo each year when waters are withdrawn for Mandya’s winter rice and sugarcane crop in early November. The marsh literally migrates along the Kaveri for several kilometres, as the water level recedes between November and March.
The marsh is the first in the reservoir area to welcome the monsoon flood waters. The life of and on the marsh is thus directly dependent on the rains at Kodagu, the catchment of the Kaveri. If rains are copious, the marsh is formed by the end of November while it may not be formed at all as it happened a couple of seasons back, when the rains were insufficient and the dam never filled to the maximum level. The marsh thus cannot escape the caprice that characterises the politics of water; it disappeared two years back as soon as it formed early in late October, when water was let out of the Krishnarajasagar dam to irrigate the parched delta in Tamil Nadu.

The Hampapura marshes encompass roughly two thousand acres of shallow marshes, the deep flow-channel of the Kaveri and in later days, vast swathes of undulating grassy downs dotted by small and large, clear ephemeral pools and the occasional gobli (Acacia nilotica) tree. Several short streams carrying runoff lead into the Kaveri from some of these ponds. A clear, meandering boundary can be established between traditional cultivation and traditional flooding zones; this boundary has come to stay over the past seventy four years of the reservoir’s existence.  As the marsh dries up by March, cultivation of short-term crops is taken up with the likes of tomato, green chilli, brinjal, okra, greens - grown and harvested before monsoon floods invade the marshland again. The tubers of the water lily are also consumed as vegetable as it is in southern China, and can be made into several tasty dishes including pakodas.

I cannot say how much this place of most was for several years my favourite haunt to go birding; one could see a whole lot of birds, quite a few  of them rare in these parts, old trees and the spectacular landscape. I remember the golden plovers that froze into position as I approached a few feet of them, crawling on all fours in squelchy mud despite the fact that with the spotting scope I had on my back I could have easily afforded the pleasure of watching the plovers on dryland half a kilometre away

I remember the mighty flocks of thousands of little and Temminck’s stints that twisted and turned in tandem with incredible swiftness when dangers like the peregrine falcon encountered them, or sometimes just by force of habit, the apparently instantaneous group response scientifically inexplicable to date.

I remember the six curlews with their long, aesthetically (but strictly utilitarian) bent beaks probing deep in the soft mud for buried annelid worms.

I remember the nineteen greater spotted eagles on one day; one of the eagles made a spectacular straight dive from over two hundred feet to catch an injured wader.

I remember the beautiful bar-headed geese landing in the marsh; their sonorous honking stir in me even now…I can swear that I heard them just now, just here.

I remember the swift-swimming, diving, squabbly flotilla of several thousand cormorants, the largest I have seen in my life, being harassed by a few hundred gulls for the freshly-caught fish.

I remember the interminable lines of glossy ibis on the horizon that transformed into equally large v-formations as they flew overhead. I have always felt that our jet planes show up as sloppy and tame when compared to ibis, duck and the wading birds, all of which brake with remarkable efficiency as they hurtle down towards the earth only to embrace it gently.

I remember the cold harsh winds that sometimes prevail over there, hitting the water with vengeance, but the mixed flocks of duck mostly brave it out by staying afloat with heads turned around and beaks tucked in their warm backs.

I remember the pheasant-tailed jacana guiding chicks over the floating water lily leaves – these birds can actually walk on them with their huge spider-like toes and sometimes from a distance, it even feels that they are walking on water!!

I remember the erratic escape tactics of the otherwise cunningly camouflaged, large, evening brown butterflies that rose from the floor leaf litter of ancient mango and venerable banyan trees near the marsh.

I remember the siege of bees that fell upon a honey buzzard raiding their hive for grubs and in the ensuing mêlée, the swarm that took after us, yours truly having to perform what was probably the run of my life before they were shaken off

I remember the huge numbers of egrets, cormorants and herons nesting on roadside and village trees on the banks of the river; the juvenile cacophony that arose from that heronry could be heard from half a mile away!!

I remember the festoons of white and lilac Asystasia and saffron-with-a-purple-centre Thunbergia alata blossoms that charmed the border thickets along canal-side paths.

I remember the sad irony of many places on the banks of the reservoir, further away from the marshes – water, water everywhere, but not one drop to drink – they are about the driest places around Mysore that I have seen.

I remember the time when I sprained my leg attempting to jump across a canal that I knew I couldn’t cross and the subsequent serendipitous encounter with a kora, a rather shy marshbird that likes to hide more than reveal itself, when I sat under a tree nursing the sprain…the “I remember”s can probably go on forever, and that was the last one for now, but why do I remember so much? This marsh, thankfully, is away from urban centres that could endanger its soul as we have as urbanites done with several water bodies in Bangalore and Mysore and elsewhere…Is it not time that these urban jewels be left alone? Is it not time that we keep more such treasures hidden, like the Hampapura marsh I just wrote about. A railway line and a highway connecting Mysore to Hassan are located at striking distance from the marsh. Although I am confident that in the near future nothing untoward will happen……People have been living in the villages bordering the marsh for centuries but their scale of life has allowed for sustenance of marsh life, with rewards in terms of land to grow paddy and vegetables when the marsh disappears each year; perhaps the scale of urban life makes it inevitable for such co-existence to remain a pipe dream…perhaps sometime when I go back again to the marshes I can see more birds, witness more exciting events and interact with the plants and insects and people, I might get more trivia to write about. Till then, let the the fields be left to rustle in the wind, a battalion of harriers gently stalking their vastness, gliding with unsurpassed grace, confining themselves barely above the canopy of golden rush………