The Wilderness of the Concrete
In our little nests built of concrete, bricks, and dreams, adorned with fancy tiles, aesthetic interiors, and equipped with everything we need, we live shielded from the scorching summer, the piercing bite of the winter, and the torrid downpour of the monsoon, often oblivious to the constant blooming spring all around. The Nature that amasses everything about us is a mere shadow of an afterthought to be desperately sought strictly on the timeline of vacations we steal away from “the real world”. Whether we find it or not, we devise means to ensure that our social media is littered with our own personal missions to display our close relationship with the earth and everything it brings in all its filtered and voice-overed glory. A recent incident that I am about to narrate got me wondering, is it the abundant nature all around us that has abandoned us for our different ways, or have we forgotten that we too exist in nature?
I live in a low-rise concrete tower in the earthquake-prone wonderous city of Chandigarh. Like many others living post 2020-the year of Covid, I too work from home and juggle my household tasks between zoom calls, impromptu meetings, and the sudden irrevocable desire to take a nap. Needless to say, not everything gets done all the time. When you spend so much time with your back against the couch cushion, you get comfortable with the idea that there’s always time to do it later. In the early summer of 2022, I had been keeping a little extra busy for over two weeks and hadn’t had the chance to attend to my mountain load of laundry. It had been bothering me, so, before my daily morning meeting, on a fine Monday riddled with blues, I finally dragged down the load and put it in the washing machine. The machine is on my bedroom balcony and shares the power source with my AC, so, that helps take away the temptation for a quick nap during my workday. Yay me!
Later in the afternoon, I caught a little break from work and brought myself to hang the clothes to dry. The best thing about summers is that your clothes are crispy dry within a matter of a couple of hours but waiting till after noon to hang up a mountain load, is perhaps not the smartest idea in the searing and heatwave afflicted North Indian summers of 45 plus degrees Celsius. Already sweating and panting a little, courtesy-dry summer air, I began about my tedious labor, pulling off clothespins and meticulously positioning my clothes for more coverage along the clothesline, barely thinking anything other than somehow just getting through my mundane task at warp speed. I had barely reached the slope of my mountain load when a pigeon sitting cozily atop my AC unit decided that it was angry for some reason and started zooming around me threateningly. I picked up a broom and tried to shoo it away but instead of flying away, it zoomed right towards me! In my panic, I dropped the broom, and the clothespins I was holding, left the washing machine’s lid open, and ran inside. Screeched and scratched to death by an angry Pigeon is not the headline I had or have any intention of becoming.
Scary images of talons and a sharp beak gnawing away at my flesh were running through my head as I watched the scary little critter through the screen door, now merrily strutting across my balcony. I mustered some courage and opened the door a peep to see if it would fly away, the taloned beast however instead of even pretending to squirm or look troubled by my massive presence, just hurried past me and the door, and nestled itself in the nook of my balcony. There is a little bracket in this nook that supports an LPG cylinder, that fuels my kitchen, and about a foot of space underneath it where this winged critter was lounging comfortably behind a makeshift curtain of a piece of torn cloth I had laid beneath the cylinder. It seemed like a good idea to put a cloth under it to prevent rust from depositing on the marble. Puzzled I looked curiously at this oddly behaving bird, and then I saw it, a glistening white egg. My first reaction was a child-like glee, looking upon this tiny little egg and its mother critter incubating a teeny tiny life. Then panic ensued as I realized, I was going to be attacked, threatened, and stared at every time I went out on the balcony. With half the thought to abandon my clothes and the balcony altogether, I sat there staring at this marvelous display of nurturing new life and pondered over how to rid myself of the inconvenience. I couldn’t leave my clothes out there rotting, and, also, I hadn’t had the foresight to plug the AC back in. So, I sat there mesmerized and befuddled, googling about what to do if pigeons decide to take up residence in your home.
It is easy to forget just how closely intertwined we are with nature living behind our closed doors and brick walls. Articles upon articles and hundreds of questions and answers on Quora convinced me that I wasn’t all that special, and this wasn’t a situation with no solution. Some articles told me to get rid of it right away sure, like that was a piece of not scary cake at all, others were kinder and said let them grow up they’ll fly away in a matter of a couple of weeks. Then there were all these afterthoughts and comments that informed me that if you don’t do anything about the pigeons and decide to let them raise their babies, guess what, they can lay new eggs, sometimes, even before the earlier batch of hatchlings has flown away. Thus creating, a vicious viscous cycle of filth and permanent non-paying guest residence at your humble abode.
After close to an hour of research, being warned by my mother of the diseases Pigeons bring, panicked phone calls to my friends detailing my plight-washed unhanged clothes and all and being imparted with wisdom from my father about how delicious a lightly spiced freshly skinned Pigeon Korma would be, I decided to take action. I blocked the Pigeon in its nest with the screen door ajar, firmly fastening the doorstopper to ensure it couldn’t come at me talons blazing. I plugged in the AC and started hanging up the clothes, every few minutes peeping through the gap in the makeshift curtain to make sure the Pigeon wasn’t planning to attack. Well, it didn’t budge. It was docile after all, merely protecting its eggs.
This became a ritual every time I had a load to wash, I would wedge the screen door between me and the pigeon family. Every day when the balcony had to be cleaned, the same process was followed. I had read that it is important that you keep the area surrounding the nest clean to keep pigeons from setting up permanent shop, but under no circumstances must you touch the eggs unless of course you want a quick fix and want the Pigeons to abandon their eggs so you can throw them out. I didn’t want to be cruel, so I let them be in their nook. About a week later I saw part of an eggshell on the balcony, the baby critter was alive! Now there were two Pigeons constantly atop my balcony, one always in the nest another sometimes perched on the railing acting as a watch guard, and other times missing. Probably out looking for juicy worms to feed the younglings. They took turns and coexisted with me peacefully raising their baby.
Here is a picture I took when the babies had grown enough for the parents to be confident in leaving them by themselves in the nest. Yes, babies. As it turns out there were two. They had black eyes unlike their parents and looked nothing like Pigeons, they were just mushy blobs with beaks. Interesting fact, young pigeons have grayish-black eyes, the piercing red in their eyes comes with time and a lot of growing up.
My ritual went on, and the baby critters grew and started resembling Pigeons until one Sunday morning I was awoken early by the doorbell, I reluctantly got up, it was my helper who took care of the dishes and cleaning around the house. Drowsily, I asked her to come back later in the afternoon, but she insisted I let her finish up her chores as she had plans for later in the afternoon. I hoisted myself in front of the TV, barely awake, hair disheveled, and a general up all night zombie-like demeanor, when I heard a ruckus on my other Pigeon-free balcony. I walked up to the balcony to see pigeons and songbirds bouncing about. One of the pigeons glanced back at me with black hopeful eyes before it flew away. I went up to the other balcony and sure enough, one of the little critters housed up in the nook of my balcony for the past 3 weeks was no longer there. The other one will probably leave its nest for a wild adventure of its own in a day or two. And I can finally have my balcony back!
Busying about our days, rushing to meet deadlines and our agendas of the day, we constantly attempt to schedule down to the second our mundane everyday ruts. In planning everything of our day and practicing consistency in our daily activities, we have become so warped that we forget that we have been awarded life. Take a moment, smell the flowers on your cute little terrace garden, feel the fresh morning breeze on your face as you sip your choice of wakeup elixir, watch the sunset from your kitchen window while whipping up dinner, or mellow down to sleep amongst the distant hum of the city and the awake chatter of nocturnal wanderers of the wild. And notice. Sometimes these wandering critters barge in unannounced, into our concrete sanctuaries, to put on a show of life, offering us a peep into “the real world,” the nature that allows us all to coexist and thrive. No travel, no planning or staging or filters, and no expense. Nature is all around us and includes us, it isn’t only found in the mountains, beaches, or forests of the world, it can be experienced by us every single day. If only we look.
By a patient and observant,
Gunjan Bhatnagar
