Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.
The crows and sweeping seabirds; garden chirps.
The elevator’s high-pitched tune (Fur Elise?), and the banging of its metal gate, indecorously flung open and shut as residents shunted up and down the building.
The rise and fall of auto motors outside, the note of their rattling rumbling mumble changing always as they sped and slowed.
The call of a walla moving up and down the street, nasal, songlike, punctuated by the ringing of his bicycle bell.
Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.
High above the call of the crows there came another bird’s sound — its long, high warbled note implied a sweeping, swooping seabird. It was several days before I glimpsed them from the window, their smooth sweep high above the crows, disdainful of the courtyard and its window cages. They circled the sky above the building-tops, settled only on high roofs where they would have a view across the sea.
A cat, white forepaws and a piebald behind, slunk across the top of a wall, paused, silent and still, to gaze into the garden below, continued, slipped under the barbed wire ringing the yard, and slipped precipitously down a tree to the ground. Later I saw him settled to his purpose, head down and ears pricked, crouched with latent spring in every muscle. He sat sentry over a corner of the red trodden-earth yard, eyes fixed on the shadowy border of deep green growth.
Bandra, Mumbai — February 2018.
From the windows at the back of the flat came the incessant craw of crows. They moved about the courtyard garden, seeming to fling themselves in short bursts, from window cage to rooftop to the curling wild boughs of jungle tree. Most of all, they liked the window cages, and each morning one would settle at ours as we had our breakfast and begin its craw, part warning-off to its mates, part entreaty for food. Ammama would feed them, scattering scaps onto a sheet of magazine paper across the bottom of the cage. Though we did not do the same, the birds came each morning from habit and in expectation, cycling through the windows of the buildings circling the court.
Our ancestors reincarnate, crows are believed to be — I was not sure this made me like them any better. I had made eye contact with a crow that sat on a roadside wall in our first day wandering the streets of Bandra — an attempt to show the bird I was unafraid, but it was me who turned away first, unnerved at a somehow deeper level than that of physical fear by the look in its round, dark eye.
The train station perpetually swarms with people. We take an auto there most days, emerging bright-eyed into the street, past the guards who sit in moulded plastic chairs at the door of the building, through the black iron gate. Sometimes we have to wander towards the main road, eyeing each passing rickshaw for shadowed faces and bright clothes in the black back seat. At the large intersections people approach the autos — women, sometimes in saris, hold out their hands, touch my head in blessing, move their hands to their mouths. Men step up with punnets of strawberries, with toys, postcards and posters. Bicycles sidle past, trays of brown and white eggs tied to their backs. As we approach the station, the mood of the streets seem to change. Shops line the paths. Muslim men in white caps, white kurtas, and long beards, and the women encased in black cloth.
Magical: Day One 