Avoiding "nature deficit disease"! My Cassia love affair continues

I read this article recently, and coincidentally received some beautiful pictures from Rags, and the the essay by Gowri and the pictures by Rags seem to be meant for each other.

Back when city schools had their trees

Friday, May 24, 2013, 9:20 IST | Agency: DNA  Gowri Ramnarayan  

“I get up listening to song birds, not the crow,” my friend said, vacationing in the hills, far from the Chennai furnace. It was Dawn Chorus Day, the first Sunday in May, when people rise early to hear the birds.  In the 1960s, my Chennai school had never heard of “Birdsong Days”. But its green campus rang with an all-day, round-the year avian orchestra.

Back then, even city schools had their trees — mango, tamarind, neem, peepal, each a colony of nests. Oh the joy of stealing mangoes! Hitting tamarind clusters with your catapult! Or, swinging on the aerial roots of the banyan, to spy on that hole where the sun-blind night owl snoozed with owlets, one, two… three?   

In summer you walked on streets canopied with interlacing branches. Rain trees laid carpets of wispy pink, the rusty shield-bearer and flame of the forest rolled out gold and scarlet paths. Maramalli, unromantically called “Cork Tree”, sprayed its creamy clusters and heady fragrance. The laburnum, amaltas, made pools of lemon gold.

A kingfisher waits patiently

Each tree was an aviary to hoopoe, wagtail, myna, dove, bee eater, babbler, kingfisher, Indian roller, woodpecker, tailor bird, magpie-robin, drongo, sunbird, minivet, shrike, hawk, rosy pastor, the fluttery red-vented bulbul, the elusive coppersmith which we knew more by its call. What a thrill when huge tree pies made a noisy halt on a massive branch! Or a crane stopped to rest on its way to the river! Watching coral-beaked parakeets winging above the banyan tree, as if green leaves and red figs were scattered in the blue above?

Can you spot the sunbird?

The spectacular paradise fly catcher, angel-white, weaving through the sun-dappled trees, trailing an incredibly long fairy tail… Was it the romantic prince of fairy tales, waiting for a princess to break the spell, and restore his human form?

And my favourite coppersmiths.  Two male barbets competing for a mate?

The humble sparrow, now a stranger to the city, was a household member then. Every morning, grandma greeted the chittukuruvi with a song, “Sparrow, little sparrow, give me all the news!” The sparrow’s nest was tucked into the niche behind the huge Ravi Varma portrait of Goddess Lakshmi. You never used the electric fan in that room. It could kill fledglings in tentative flight.

Indian summer is imaged in the koel’s call, celebrated in centuries of myth and verse.

Suddenly, I wonder. If she had heard the bird’s voice crackling through the urban din, could Begum Akhtar have poured out her passion in “Koyaliya mat kare pukar, karejwa laage katar” (Don’t call, a dagger strikes my heart),?

Mishearing karejwa (heart) as kajaria (kohl), I had long believed that she addressed the Golden Oriole… Maankuyil in my mother tongue Tamil, the name a variant of the kuyil or koel. How striking those jet black “kajal” stripes lining its ruby red eyes, against dazzling yellow! In flight it spins gold, in song it spills incandescence. Like love, the oriole’s aria pierces the heart with bliss and pain. 

Where are those endless V formations of water birds in twilight flight? The pools are gone, the river dry. A condominium walls my balcony, replacing the mango tree which housed a hundred birds singing at dawn, chattering at dusk. The same balcony where, 20 years ago, my son had been wonderstruck by three miniscule bits of fluff, (sunbird chicks?) emerging from a hidden nest behind the flower pots, hopping on to his foot with carefree bonhomie!

Today, you can hear the oriole on a Youtube clip maybe, where you can also learn about a fast spreading modern ailment: nature deficit disease. Then you know what the eerie ballad means: “The sedge has wither’d from the lake, and no birds sing.”

The author is a playwright, theatre director, musician, and journalist writing on the performing arts, cinema and literature.  

So, plant that tree and look out of your window, for this is what you may see.

All these Cassia pictures by Rags as he looked out of his window and played "I spy" with his camera!

I miss my neighbour's Millingtonia which provided a convenient perch for the birds of our street, and delighted me consequently.