Empty epiphanies

Suddenly, as if it were a giant bird eye temporarily gauzed by a nictating membrane, the sun's searching ardour dims and the light turns soft, still retaining the yellow warmth that shows the grass all around me as a precious wilderness -- of subdued golden hues, the stems heavy with ripening seeds, nodding to each other or tangled together with a nonchalance that only grass growing wild can know -- of tones and shadows that belong in a painting, like scapes born from soft brush strokes.

I am large, I have multitudes.

I have walked something like 3-4 kilometres (over the dusty roads of my colony and then, Cross-country across as-of-now empty plots) to get to where the grass starts, and then maybe another...circumventing clumps of Lantana, walking doglegs around thorn trees, muscling my way through -- with the lens held high over my head -- where a barely seen trail is overgrown with wild basil and other brush, shoulder high, like a stockade.

My footfalls aren't as light as I would like them to be. Juvenile baya weaver birds out on feeding sorties gather together and watch me pass; prinias and zitting cisticolas clamber up to vantage points and keep me in sight, repeatedly darting glances at me and as repeatedly looking away; a long-tailed shrike imagines I am some bird of prey out to steal its kill and gobbles down a fat grasshopper with unseemly haste; grey francolins burst into flight, in a heart-stopping explosion of wings, one after the other.

But then, I have been here before, and because the grey francolins keep outsmarting me, I can say I have known these defeats before...

I walk some more through grass that's a mid-thigh high, skirting a patch of nettles, all that is there -- this year when the rains failed -- of a seasonal puddle where I have seen munias feed in many, very hundreds.

I am here for the Booted Eagle. And I know (in the way a Birdman knows), I am on time; but no bird takes off into the skies out of the broken treeline in front of me, even as I wait -- shifting my weight from leg to leg, in turns standing tiptoe and rocking back on the balls of my feet to relax the muscles there -- what seems like an eternity or an hour.

As oft before, my thoughts stray and I wonder again, if this is the pinnacle of my existence, that I can be footloose and fancy free to indulge in the pursuit of birds; or my nadir in monetary and career (aren't they the same thing?) terms -- that I, an articulate, educated and experienced professional while my way away thus, in a lonely wait, for a bird that doesn't come.

Then, peripheral to the gaze of my mind,out of the side of my right eye, I see movement.

Its the grass, I see. Its moving. A breeze has sprung and even as I watch, in wave after wave, the whole meadow dances in unison as if each stem and blade of grass has picked up some tune that stays unheard by me.

That's all the answer I will ever get from a meadow of wild grass -- I chuckle to myself; as I turn around, to walk some more kilometres, and search for some more birds.