Neera Kashyap |
Neera Kashyap
Patricia
Gonsalves pushed her laptop away to lean her head on the poetry volumes that
lay stacked near her elbow. A wave of nausea assailed her for a moment. She
kept her head steady till it passed. Instead of the anthology she was compiling
of twenty contemporary poets on the theme, ‘Life and loves’, she had been
thinking more of death. Her impressions were hallucinatory: waking from deep
sleep by someone tapping her on her forehead – someone, whom she sensed, even
through a fuzzed brain, was not there; dreams of crossing over a mountain pass,
passing through a dark tunnel; a shadow lurking in the stairway; a sudden
invisible hand shake.
What
soothed Patricia was not Dylan Thomas who raged against death but Mary
Elizabeth Frye: ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep/
I am not there.......‘ She sighed, murmured: ‘I am the sun on ripened grain, I
am the gentle autumn rain…’ She, Patricia Gonsalves whose acerbic tongue
had brought her students to their knees…and to their senses…. she who could set
on track a student’s life with her insight and her sharpness…. now wished for herself
just peace and rest, just peace and… ’I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet
birds in circled flight….’
She turned her
head carefully to listen to the noise coming from the window sill. Her frayed
flowered curtain ballooned into her eighth-floor apartment with the strong sea
breeze. It was a parrot. On coming closer, she saw it fluff out its wings and
pull its head down into its feathers. Its eyes were weepy. It stood unmoving,
its left-wing dangling. Above the hurt feather was a streak of fresh blood.
Patricia watched
the parrot for a while, then said sharply: ‘Come parrot, come to me, let me
take a look at your hurt.’ The parrot did not budge, its red beak tucked deep
into its fluffed out shivery green feathers. She said patiently: ‘Look parrot. I
know Campbell’s poem. Would you like to hear it?’ She cooed, ‘A parrot from the
Spanish Main, full young and early caged, came o’er with
bright wings to the bleak domain of Mulla’s shore…
now, parrot, we can’t get more realistic than that, can we? … will you let me
hold you a bit?’ The parrot waddled over, its crusting eyes nearly shut.
Patricia held its yielding body in her hands and slid the window shut.
In
the toilet, her mind worked feverishly. She saw that the cut ran long and deep,
the blood now flowing onto the trembling body. She pressed a pad of gauze on it
and held it down for several minutes till the gauze was damp with blood. She
tried to clean the wound with another pad of wet gauze but the bird fluttered
in her hands, its sharp claws digging into her palm. She thought of diluted betadine
solution, but felt helpless with the parrot’s restless pain and shock, both of
which felt like tremors through her own body. She had no idea why she opened
her apartment door to seek whatever help came her way from the staircase
passage.
She
stared at the shut door of the opposite apartment – the Kulkarnis – a surname
she associated with loud altercations and midnight howls, an implacable man and
an inscrutable woman, and decades of polite avoidance. The door opened.
Diminutive Mrs Kulkarni stood on her threshold and stared at her and at the
blood swab on the parrot, ran into her home and brought out a bottle full of a
thick brown liquid.
‘Raw
honey from my village,’ said Mrs Kulkarni, ‘the best remedy my grandmother showed
me how to use.’ The women moved quickly into Patricia’s apartment, as if they
had walked in together many times, instead of for the first. Mrs Kulkarni
hummed as she worked: cleaning the wound, applying a thick layer of honey with
cotton buds, wrapping a gauze bandage all around the wing and holding it in
place with masking tape. She placed the bird carefully in a hastily-assembled cardboard
carton, covering the top with a cotton towel to keep out the draft.
‘You
could give it some soft seeds like rolled oats or sunflower seeds. It should
not choke on anything too soft or too hard,’ said Mrs Kulkarni, hitching up her
sari as she made to leave. Patricia Gonsalves had noted with amazement how still
and restful the bird had been in her hands, almost as if it recognized who the
avian vet was, and gave itself to her.
Over
the next six weeks, Mrs Kulkarni came in several times with her bottle of honey
to change the bird’s dressing. She helped Patricia try out the bandage wrap herself.
The bird was more restless in her hands, blinked and gulped with each jab and
twitch, but held out.
Alone,
Patricia felt a living presence in her apartment, as if there was a life here
and a reason to live. She would remove the towel from the top of the box and
watch the parrot open its eyes to blink, to waddle across the length of the box,
flap its good wing in an attempt to fly. When Mrs Kulkarni left just a honeyed
dab on the wing, Patricia began to read out bird poems to the parrot. At first
the poems she chose were of flying, Shelley’s Skylark: ‘Higher
still and higher from the earth thou springest like a cloud of fire…’ and John
Clare’s, ‘Just by the wooden brig a bird flew up…’ When the parrot graduated
from eating chillies and oats to rice grains and watermelon seeds, she made her
own switch to poems more eternal: Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale:
‘Thou
wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No
hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown…’
One night she had been trying to read louder to outscore the
agitated voices coming from the Kulkarnis’ apartment when she heard her door bell
ring sharply. She turned on the lights and opened her front door to see the
inscrutable Mrs Kulkarni – in a nightie this time, her tight bun now loose and
wiry around her shoulders, her smile fixed. She asked after the parrot and
flopped down on a stool at some distance from the carton. Soon her smile
puckered into a grimace and her body began to shake with sobs.
Patricia Gonsalves laid down her book and waited. She felt the
same impatience she had always felt when confronted by a weepy student who
broke down after a tongue-lashing. But this was no ruthless assessment of a
student’s acumen, nor a sly push in giving a student direction. This was a
woman who seemed to get a daily drubbing. But surely, she could stand up to
that cold implacable fellow, that unsmiling son-of-a-bitch, that….
‘It’s of no use,’ said Mrs Kulkarni with suddenness, her tears still
wet on her cheeks, her wire hair sticking to her forehead. ‘I have done
everything to please him… his family. It is never enough… never enough. I
thought earning money of my own would win me some respect, if not affection. My
catering business, it started small but grew, did well. The demand for my food
service only grows. But his demands… first he wants me to show him my business
accounts, then where I spend my money… my own money! His mother supports him,
my sons… too. You get used to the abuse… but deliberate control!’ She shook her
head, continuing, ‘You know, Miss Gonsalves…. I may wish to grow, to expand… but
beneath this control is his indifference to my wish to grow, to expand… this
really worries me. This wish wins no respect… this wish is ignored… deliberately
controlled.’
Patricia’s
irritation faded into an unfamiliar sense of helplessness. She unclenched her
fist, put aside her book, and rose to get Mrs Kulkarni a glass of water. They
sat in silence for a while till a calm descended on the room broken by the
sound of wings fluttering against the towel thrown over the carton. Mrs
Kulkarni ran to uncover the box. The parrot hopped out, flapped its wings as it
waddled unsteadily across the room. Mrs Kulkarni removed the dab on the bird’s
wing, asked for a piece for wet cotton to clean off the honey, so the ants
don’t get at it, she said. The women nodded to each other, as Mrs Kulkarni took
the parrot to the windowsill. They watched the bird waddle and flutter
tentatively down its length. Then in one fell swoop, it flew into the sky.
Patricia
plunged back to work on the anthology, only to see more clearly how the women
poets seemed to make a brave bid for self-expression, only to be held back by a
strong and assertive patriarchy. She was glad Mrs Kulkarni hollered back, even
if her hollering sounded more like a wail. So much for her own brutal student
assessments, so much for her own acerbic tongue that wished for nothing more
than to strip off ignorance and let the innate flower.
Patricia’s
earlier thoughts and impressions of death turned into an obsessive
preoccupation with poems on death, with books on how different cultures
approached death with an uncanny naturalness. Her own poetry acquired strong
overtones of death. It was while writing a haiku that she felt the sharpest sense
of pain and isolation, at the futility of it all. In the light of her table
lamp, she looked at her cursive slant in her poetry diary:
gravestone –
the broad
leaves of stinging nettle
cover the
inscription
Tears rolled
down her cheeks as she rested her head on the volumes of poetry stacked on her
desk. She turned her head carefully to listen to the noise on her window sill. The
parrot fluttered in the air before landing noisily. It strutted around
confidently, trilling its arrival. Patricia approached it carefully. This was unnecessary,
for the parrot flew straight into her hands, its heart beating warm and wild
between her palms. Holding it close to her chest, she yanked open her front
door. Mrs Kulkarni stood on her threshold.
Joyful
laughter rang through the stairway.
***
What a lovely uplifting tale, so well written. It was a pleasure to read.
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