Not everything is lost

 I am inundated with the calls of the cuckoos all around me. It has been a couple of months now. Their calls never seem to end.
Starting from a low pitched coo... coo... of a solitary bird it soon attains crescendo of several cuckoos simultaneously screeching in unison. They have several tunes to their credit. At times very plaintive, soon to change into other modes including one that sounds very alarming. Are these pleasing to the ears or shrill and jarring? I have not been able to come to any conclusion. But I enjoy a sense of being one with nature. I feel I am not alone but there are other living beings surviving in harmony with nature against all odds. It brings to my mind a sense of order and rhythm and tells me all is not lost.

While my attention is solely taken away by these birds, I also wonder what happened to my other friends, the mynas, the spotted doves, the barbets, including a crow pheasant with its guttural ghuk… ghuk, which hops in and out occasionally like a guest actor in a movie. I start focussing my attention. I am reassured all of them are very much there. Not that they have given up their chirping and cooing and hopping but they only appear subdued in the presence of their more voluble friend, the cuckoo. Each seems to live in its own world undisturbed by the others’ presence, yet making a kaleidoscopic harmony.
In the midst of all this, there is the ceaseless dance of the squirrels scampering from branch to branch, moving so deftly and with such determination that I keep wondering what gives them such motivation and to what purpose. I do not find any.

My neighbours are troubled by my trees which the squirrels use nonchalantly to enter and exit from their flats in the complex that has come up. I understand their problem. I fetch a help after great difficulty and he chops the tree to the required height. My tree only knows to grow. It does not understand my neighbour’s requirement.

I have a Goan friend, a very soft spoken gentleman residing close by to my house. The other day I found him in a furious verbal duel with some shoddy characters. He was trying to save a small tree in front of his house planted and nurtured by him while the others were trying to chop its branches for their all-too-important necessity of feeding their goats. They were rebuffed. My friend beamed with satisfaction. He is a frail old man in his 80s. I walked away in the satisfaction that not everything is lost.