Parakeets

A few months before the pandemic, a flock of parakeets settled down in the trees around our house. I remember because they are loud birds that make their presence known in the morning and evening hours. Abruptly, a new sound was added to our surroundings as their screams pierced the din for a couple of hours every day as they flew from tree to tree. For the rest of the day they would fall so quiet that it would feel like they had moved away only to come back twice again the next day. I also remember because birds are one among only a couple of things my stepfather and I could talk about and he’d noticed their arrival too.  

I had known him for as long as I can remember; first as a family friend who would come home every other day; then, a few years after my father’s death, as my mother’s companion; and after their wedding, as a parent. Throughout this period, my brother and I stuck to calling him Uncle. Especially after he became a parent, he emerged as an authoritarian who did not brook dissent. Since we didn’t see eye to eye on most things, my short conversations with him always ended in bristling silences. When he was still just another uncle, he was fond of telling us about his escapades in distant countries; we later found out that they were the stories of others.  
Uncle couldn’t do without his daily drinks at night after which he liked to subject me to monologues. They had a raw quality to them, stripped by alcohol of the filters adults employed when talking to their children. I learnt a new vocabulary and a new kind of fear. I learnt of the powerlessness of having to open my room door on hearing the knock of a man whose word was law and listen to him voice insecurities he would not admit to in the sober morning. The threat of violence always felt like it was imminent. He had hit me twice; once brutally. I was old enough to rationalize it as evidence of acceptance into his fold.

There were no tender moments; those require the sharing of honesty and vulnerability between men. There was concern for me that my mother knew more about than I did. When I did well, he would express his pride to others; my failures were used to taunt me into working towards my potential. There were only two kinds of conversations I could have with him. When he felt nostalgic and remembered the old days, he could talk without trying to dominate the listener provided the listener asked questions at the right time that led to other fond memories.
The other kind of conversations we could have were about wildlife. He had an abiding love for the wilderness that led to wildlife photography becoming his calling. It was Uncle who gave me my first bird book - his copy of Salim Ali’s book of Indian birds. Even before his marriage to my mother, he would take us into Karnataka’s jungles. While he drove, he would play his favourite English music; songs like Demis Roussos’ My Friend the Wind were played several times every trip as he sang along. We went to Bandipur, Nagarahole, K Gudi and fishing in the Cauvery. On one of these trips, I saw my first Tiger thanks to him.

We were driving through Bandipur’s forests on a Gypsy when we heard a jungle fowl shriek a couple of times in the bushes on our left.

Uncle yelled, “alarm call!”.

The driver wasn’t convinced. “Could be but maybe not, saar”

He was never one to be questioned.

 “Left hogappa!” go left he yelled in Kannada.

Sure enough, we soon came across a herd of langur jumping and vocalizing their unmistakable alarm calls which were sharp bursts of energy as opposed to their usual whooping sounds. Then, as though the whole thing was choreographed to include all the alarm call specialists, a barking deer called out in fear as it dashed across. Their terror was our joy. Uncle was triumphant.

“Heladnalla!” I told you, he said to the driver, establishing his superior knowledge of the wild with glee.

The poor driver - who must have cursed the forest for conspiring against him that day - smiled and nodded graciously as he switched off the engine. Our wait began.

We scanned the forest floor for flame-like patterns as the alarm calls continued. The driver - in an attempt to recover lost jungle cred - stood up on the bonnet to get a deeper view into the forest.

“There! There’s something there! Either Tiger or Leopard saar. Please check through the binoculars”. His girth and weak knees disqualified Uncle from standing on the seat to check. He handed me the binoculars and asked me to look. I peered into the distance in the direction the driver was pointing in and I saw the unmistakable swishing tail and gait of a big cat walking away from us. It looked over its shoulder in my direction for a second. The late evening sun shone directly on the animal giving it an irritating glow preventing me from identifying it before it disappeared into the foliage. But it is identification that completes a forest sighting. You cannot say, “I saw something. Could be Leopard or Tiger, I’m not sure”. You might as well just say you didn’t see anything and your disappointment will be more believable. If video or photo evidence is best, certainty in sighting comes second and I didn’t have it. You could lie while narrating your experience later, but that doesn’t feel right; you see what the jungle shows you.

“Definitely a big cat. I couldn’t tell which one because of the light but I thought it may have been a leopard..”

“Look at that, the guy has the privilege of seeing a big cat and can’t tell which one. I can tell from the intensity of the alarm call and from the way you said it looked over its shoulder that you saw a Tiger”, he said.

And so it was that I saw my first Tiger.

Until the last couple of years of his life, wildlife remained the only medium through which we could distil a functioning relationship. Yet even here he would snap at any question he considered silly or repetitive; questions I may have asked just to make conversation when he used to take his Great Dane, my younger brother and me – in that order of affection - to the Palace Grounds in Bangalore for walks when we were kids. My questions had to be suited to what he may be in the mood to talk about. If I did not have those, silence was recommended as he yelled orders to his dog in Konkani and held forth about how important it was to learn to be silent like the wise old owl. If I asked whether the owl could have become wise if everyone around it had the same idea and chose silence, he would snap again. I didn’t know it at the time, but in later years I began to recognise his lack of patience for silly or repetitive questions bubble up inside me every now and then. I was mortified and worked hard towards suppressing it with mixed results.

On these walks - and to my mother’s irritation at home – he would wear camouflage as though he was a denizen of the forest, out of place in the urban world. Unlike anyone else I’d known, he had no patience for social decorum. My mother was always on tenterhooks with him when they met people as he was capable of snapping at them regardless of age, gender, or status. Being the only son of a well to do family meant that he did not need to keep a job for most of his life, learn how to navigate social spaces in a professional setting or cultivate useful relationships. This lack of worldly wisdom meant that his trust in someone – on the rare occasion that he chose to confer it – could be as unquestionable and beyond reason as his love for my mother. It also affected the kind of friends he could make.

Only a gifted friend-maker could forge a close and long-term relationship him because it required a diminishing of one’s ego in front of his, a clear understanding of what pleased him and what didn’t and a knowing smile in the face of a growl as he snapped at you and forgot about it the next moment. Few could put in the effort it took. That my father was one of the few who did was only evident to us in the years after my mother married Uncle. We realised then that when my father died, Uncle lost his closest friend. Everyone else maintained a healthy distance to the extent that we were unable to distinguish his friends from his acquaintances.

The loneliness that this led to was evident during the pandemic. His house was his kingdom and he rarely ventured out for social visits but pre Covid, he would visit the neighbourhood club every evening for his daily quota of alcohol. In those days alcohol for him was associated with a location and catching up with acquaintances. As a long-time member of the club, he was a well-known figure among the staff and the hi-hellos with other members over drinks was as much socialising as he could manage but it was important enough for him to shed his camouflage and put on pants.

All this stopped abruptly in early 2020 with the pandemic and he started drinking at home. When alcohol became disassociated with location, it lost its association with time too. For someone who did not know how to express vulnerabilities, stress from a business venture gone wrong meant that he could only look towards more alcohol as a crutch to cope with. When he started drinking at odd hours of the day, it led to a heavy increase in intake which led to worse sleep which meant more time for drinking; he had surrendered himself to this spiral. On some nights he would knock on my room door asking me for some whiskey or gin that I had started to take on lockdown Fridays. It was the most apologetic I’d ever seen him.

He was soon diagnosed with alcohol induced liver disease. He had become weak to the point that he was struggling under his own weight. My brother and I would help him get up from his chair or the commode and hold his hand while he moved. I had never held his hand before. Father-son relationships change over time and the shifts in the power dynamic are usually gradual. In Uncle’s case, it was sudden as he’d held onto his control over us for as long as he could. His illness defanged him and made us his caregivers. It felt like an overnight coup against a dictator who had ruled for decades. The illness also made him constantly restless and he would ask us to lift him and get him to sit back down several times a day. My brother - who’d had a better relationship with him over the years – could be firm when he refused to comply with the doctor’s instructions; it was left to me to be compassionate and reassuring during those months. I found that compassion, if genuine, can be powerful. It cannot undo decades of a difficult relationship but it can untie the knots of bitterness it created. It can sink holes in stone and create tethers that can outlast death.

As his illness progressed, he wanted my mother around him at all times. He would call out for her if she disappeared from his line of sight for more than five minutes. When she would come to him and ask him what he wanted, he would fall silent. End stage liver disease affects the brain and he was in a confused state, unable to remember things.
Despite this, he had noticed the arrival of the Parakeets. “I remember when this house was once full of sparrows and I remember when they disappeared forever. This is the first time I’ve heard Parakeets in this house”, he said. He couldn’t go to the terrace or step out into the garden to see them but their calls in the evening cheered him up. He would imitate the Red-whiskered Bulbul’s song by whistling at them from his chair. Any day when he heard a Shikra’s high pitched ‘ki-keee’ was a special day; they were the only raptors in the garden worthy of the name; Black Kites were disqualified because of their scavenging ways.

In those lockdown days, I had returned to birding after many years. I would take a mug of tea and my kindle onto the terrace in the evenings and spend time reading or watching birds in the garden that distracted me with their calls. I watched the parakeets as they sat on the coconut leaves and swung with the breeze. They had bright red beaks, green bodies, and long tail feathers of yellow and blue. That is a lot to take for granted; I didn’t give them a second look when I used to go birding. When they were resting comfortably, they would sound like babies that had found something amusing. When they flew, their long, streamlined tails looked like winged arrows released across all the evening colours.  

In April last year, Uncle died at three-thirty in the morning after a fortnight on the ventilator. I returned home from the hospital for a bit at around six and I was pacing in the garden when I noticed something falling in regular intervals from a tree. I went up to it and saw a lone Parakeet gorging on Bimblis - a sour fruit that grows along the trunk of the tree in heavy bunches. It would pick a small bunch in one leg, hobble to its spot on the adjacent branch and eat them while allowing half to fall. One of the reasons I had stopped birding was because I had become nocturnal in the last few years, missing out on the early mornings when birds are most active. I must have watched that Parakeet eat Bimblis for an hour that day.