Chip, Spock and Cap

Angad has named the three mynah chicks Chip, Spock and Cap. We don't know their gender, but we're assuming Spock is a guy. Cap is kind of tiny and ambiguous. Chip is just biiig, because he (or she) was the first born. She got the juiciest worms and the big winged insects-- possibly those ants that grow wings when the first rain hits the warm earth. We called them Pak Mui (Pak=wings, mui=ant in Konkani. This year, we saw them fly out of anthills in droves when the monsoon reached Goa).
The mynah in our window often reminds me of Charles Darwin and his time in the jungle. A hundred and fifty years ago, the jungles would have been more dense, civilisations less crowded, less threatening. How he observed for days and months how animals reared their young, how they young fought for survival, who won and who lost out.
Chip hatched on the 27th of June. Spock a day later and Cap arrived a few days after his two older siblings. By this time, Chip was older, stronger and able to muster enough strength to hold her head high, grabbing most of the chunky worms and insects. Spock was growing too, but little Cap, he's remained small and chirpy. If they are competitors in the food chain, why don't they attack each other? What is encoded in our genes that makes us not attack our own blood?
Now Chip is almost as big as her parents and she climbs to the mouth of the nest and calls out to her parents. I think she'll begin venturing out soon. I can see that the mother is not feeding them as often as she was, she's also not shoving the food she gets down her throat, but challenging them to peck, grab, chew and swallow.
There is something interesting about Cap too. He's the youngest, smallest in size, does not get the cues his mother gives when she senses danger...like when I open the door she makes this guttural, alarmed cheeeep cheeeep that is obviously meant to signal her chicks to lie low. Both Spock and Chip immediately bury themselves in the nest becoming almost invisible. But Cap, he's a little oblivious, a little rebellious, a little unaware. He keeps calling out to his mother, still standing at the door. It makes me think that perhaps, the younger sibling, on account of being the one who lost out in the natural order, got the smallest share of the pie, did not grow as much in size, has something else aiding him, a certain fearlessness that perhaps aids his survival. Chip on the other hand, is well fed, strong, cautious. Spock on the other hand, sigh, is the one with a little bit of both. That also makes him the least interesting, with the most interesting name! Wonder what kind of parents they will make?

A bird in the window can give you a little peek into life itself. Chip Spock and Cap, despite the mites that are crawling out of their window and the stink they have created, are interesting little creatures. More when they begin to take wing!

Two...three...four blue eggs

Two mynahs on the window sill, sit on four eggs. Turquoise blue eggs that remind me of smooth round pebbles or those scented soaps they hand out in restaurants.

When do birds visit human homes, with human activity happening day in and day out, shower, flush, child screawming amma.... "I want to watch teevee"

In fact it's the second nest in our house in a month.

Chhedi and his box of crayons

Chhedi

Chhedi helps the vegetable vendor near my building. Ever since I gave him a colouring book and a box of crayons, he smiles at me that you-and-I-share-a-secret smile, at once hesitant and exultant, generous with the Bhindis and cucumber he is weighing for me. "Did you colour them all?" I asked him a few days after I'd gifted him the book. "Yes, all of it," he said, flashing a smile that hid a feeling of accomplishment.
The first time I saw him, he had no footwear. Delhi's summer can be excruciating, and walking on the concrete without footwear, severely unkind. I thought of my ten odd pairs of shoes lying in the rack.
The first time Chhedi came to deliver the vegetables, I asked him why he walked barefoot. He did not answer directly but brushed it aside, he must be all of 12, but he's a little guy with self pride.
"I live with the vendor, he feeds me, I help him," Chhedi told me one day when I asked him where he belonged. He'd travelled several hundred kilometers to Delhi, to earn some money. He did not tell me about his home, or parents or siblings.
A few days later Chhedi came again with vegetables, this time wearing a pair of slippers, hand-me-downs but worn rather proudly.
That's when I gave him the book.
I saw Chhedi again the other day. The Summer heat had sprouted heat boils on his face and hands, he looked scruffy and unwashed. I had forgotten about the book till he gave me that you-and-I-share-a-secret smile.

What happened to Budhumuni?

"Please help our Budhumuni..."

I remember the old man, Budhumuni's grandfather, his taut body after decades of hard manual labour wrapped in a thin layer of skin, his forehead marked with two vertical lines drawn with some sort of a white paste_perharps referring to his tribal identity, his body bent over, hands folded, brows furrowed.
"We'll not get her married till she's at least 26," he'd said, as if keeping her unmarried longer was going to get her the opportunities she missed by not being a child bride!

Budhumuni was the reason why Rekha Kalindi, her 12-year-old friend and neighbor, told her parents she was not ready for marriage yet. Budhumuni had been the bolder, outspoken, free-thinking individual. She's never heard of Shah Rukh Khan or Hrithik Roshan, but with the strange inventiveness pre-teens develop, she had used a razor to sculpt her eyebrows. "I do it on my own," she's giggled when I asked her about her 'done-up' eyebrows.

Rekha was the shy girl, Budhumuni was all words. It was perhaps this ability to speak up for herself that had led her parents to not push her for marriage.
Till the day Rekha blurted out in her school that her parents were planning to get her married off and she didn't want to. It had been Budhumuni's idea that she bring it up in school. Rekha knew she had her friend's support, that Budhumuni could speak all those lines about the ills of child marriage, those long and difficult explanations of why child-marriage is a health risk, that the girl child, if given the opportunity to educate herself, can perform as well, and built a life for herself. That the reason Rekha's sister had grown so weak and frail was because she'd been married off off early and suffered several miscarriages. Budhumuni had explained how Rekha would have to suffer a similar fate if she did not stand up and speak up now.
Then, Rekha did. And overnight, she became the star. First the local media, then the national media, then the international media came down to meet Rekha. She blossomed under all this attention, she pulled out her 'good dress', the one her school had given her for the photo-shoots, she learnt to point at the right things, pose the right way, say the right words. She learnt that if she ran across the narrow lane between the daub and wattle huts they lived in, the pictures were appreciated. She memorized lines she'd have to speak at rallies and community meetings. Rekha loved being the star. The shy girl was now a chatterbox.
The President of India gave the girls (Rekha and three others who had refused child marriage) Rs 10,000, which Rekha set aside in a bank. They were awarded the National Bravery Awards. They travelled to Delhi, sat on bejewelled elephants and waved at the crowds as they rode on Rajpath. A new world had opened up, a new world of opportunities that might just turn her dream of becoming a school teacher into reality.
It had been Budhumuni's dream too. She had been the smarter one and when they'd been admitted to school by the NGO, Budhumuni, on account of being the smarter one had been promoted to Class 4, while Rekha qualified for Class 2. Budhumuni wanted a bicycle so she could go to middle school which was in the next village. "I want to become a teacher," she'd said, partly because the girls did not know of a profession more qualified than that. "Me too," Rekha had added.
When we set off with the girls, the brave ones who had refused to be married off and were now being tom-tomed as the stars, who would speak at community meetings and make an example of how the girl child can flourish. The car was full and there was no place for Budhumuni. She stayed back in the village, waving to her friend.
What happened to Budhumuni?

The bird who knows her birthday

It began with a math lesson. Simple addition.

Do you think animals have a sense of numbers, Angad?
Of course they do amma, they have a way of knowing their birthdays, how many days before it is their birthday, how old they'll be...

My immediate response was a smile. Then a hug. Then to speak about the sparrow who knows when an egg has been stolen, or how a mother lion knows how many cubs she has, or a mama-bird knows which chick has been fed and how much.

Migration and magnetic poles, estimation of wind speed or synchronising distance and the time required to cover it..., birds and animals would know all of this and more, but I could not think beyond eggs in a nest.

A couple of days later, Angad had to speak a few lines on how important water is to animals. In Hindi. So we wrote about how life began in water (to which he pulled out a dinosaur book which had illustrations of how life evolved from unicellular to multi-cellular to fish that began to walk and turned into dinosaurs) and so I had to drag him back into talking about the importance of water.

Kya aap jante hai ki prithvi par jeevan samudro me hi paida hua tha...

He took a while to memorise that, rephrasing it each time dfferently, sometime forgetting to say Paida, sometimes forgetting samudra...

We then spoke about how animals living in forests drink from rivers or lakes, how animals like the camel can live without it for days and others like crocodiles and turtles, live in water. Then some gyan-tinted-line on how the hot summer dries up the water around us, so please make sure to put out water for thirsty animals, cows, cats and dogs.

Of course he did not get 'selected'.

No matter how non-pushy or open one is about education, no matter how much we believe in giving each child his or her own space to grow and develop, if you are one of those parents whose only option has been to send your child to a school which lacks vision or imagination, you are left wondering what to feel when your child is not one of those who is 'selected'.

Looking inward, I also realised that in the hurry to give information and push an agenda (to put out water tubs for thirsty animals), to make Angad sound intelligent different, I forgot all he wanted was to have fun.
I forgot his bird who knows her birthday.