Wild gulmohar yard
red blooms rotting
on moist earth black
deep-green
clouds
love-dark
shadow afternoon’s
sweet, airy yard
sky growling
gathering
bird singing
bulb going
lashings
cold
wet
love-dark
scented moist earth black
how the pouring washes us apart.
Bokaro, Jharkhand, June 16
The crane flew alongside the train. Small yellow legs thrown back taut, off-white wings outstretched wide and the orange beak straight, on the bird’s probing but calm white face. And with a slow, beautiful arc with its curvaceous wing-feathers above the bright green watery foliage, the monsoon slush, the bird swooped down, like a leaf falling through air. The bogey, with me on the windy window-side, overtook the silvery bird falling with gusts and whiz.
Some time later, the butterfly came, first almost brushing the moving windowpane and then slowly fluttering away, its orange wings with black round patterns brightening up a receding village’s cloudy landscape.
In the end, a bug got hit. The buzzing insect flying in from the other way got hit by the fast, crazy train window, and it fell, into that window’s sill, upturned, wreathing in pain, then falling quiet. A violet-greenish black-bluish bug, gasping on the sill, sheltered from the gusts and unaware of fast losing its territory, its landscapes, of being on a speeding train compartment.
I watched and studied and thought and tore some newspaper and made a cone that was wobbly and light and began lifting the injured bug up. I didn’t want to touch. It was an insect. I didn’t know what type. The limp insect was also fragile—the tiny legs, the mini wings brittle to human touch.
But always, at the paper cone’s contact, the insect would slip, its round body bounce away. And then, it revived. The upturned legs shook, quivered. I tried to pick again but failed. The bug now knew. It shirked. It turned and stood its feet and began bumping around the sill on its many broken, many intact restless legs. Then silently, with effort, it began climbing off the sill, probing, knowing new, metallic territory, approaching me, the berserk bug. And now I caught it, gliding it into the cone, and slowly, holding my breath, offered the bug tottering inside the sunlit newspaper to the howling, blasting window wind. The paper dropped, regained shape as it got pushed back in the open air and flew away. I rubbed my hands and looked at the window sill now.