Of Koels Peacocks and Home

Of Koels and Peacocks and Home

Have lived in Ahmedabad since my birth! Love this place, its friendly helpful people, its cuisine, its history and even its hot summers! Above all else, love my home, of twenty years now, a first floor apartment with huge windows. Friends and visitors to our home often remark about the peace and quiet surrounding the vicinity that has a slightly cooler atmosphere even in the summers.

Our bedrooms overlook part of a huge campus of an art college, which is something of self-contained miniature, eco-system replete with fauna and trees. In a bid to attract more bird-life, more trees are getting regularly planted by a dedicated group of environment-conscious enthusiasts. One can also witness some wildlife that includes, monkeys, an occasional mongoose, squirrels, koels (cuckoos), peacocks, wood pigeons, mynahs, pigeons, cacophonous, dull gray jungle babblers, with yellow-colored beaks, that move in groups of seven, bulbuls, rose-ringed parakeets, drongos, sunbirds, honey suckers, eagles, owlets and surprisingly even occasionally spot a blue-feathered kingfisher, a hoopoe, a sand grouse, a flycatcher, a woodpecker or a golden oriole. Common sparrows have become 'less common' probably shooed away with the number of mobile phones in use! Early mornings also bring in the whistling sounds of a bird, (have no idea of its name) that lets out a long whistle, almost like a signature tune, quite pleasant to the ears. At nightfall during the winter months it is not unusual to hear the cry of bats that have made their home in the several ashoka trees in the area.

Most of all I love the pleasant summers mornings that bring in the cool summer breeze and the sounds of hundreds of twittering birds, interspersed with the loud cries of peacocks and koels, a reminder that the monsoon is not far away. Most peacocks are early risers and the predawn hours fill the atmosphere with their cries. It is interesting to hear the hollow-sounding, plaintive call of the koel, which suddenly rises to an energetic crescendo, the interval between calls shortening, as other koels register their presence and join the chorus. The blooming flowers of the rain tree sometimes lend a mild scent to the summer mornings. With the monsoons getting closer they can be heard in the evenings too. Early summer mornings and nights, hearing the whit-to-whit cry of a stray waterfowl, (probably a lapwing) is an added reminder that the rains are close at hand.

Sometimes we have even spotted a peacock on a neighboring terrace with its feathers all fanned out in a monsoon dance trying to woo peahens! And there is this particular peacock that has made a regular perch on the branch of the tree just a few feet away from our window giving us the joy of seeing the brilliant colors of his feathers at close quarters!

I love my home and its surroundings, which are a contrast to the thankfully distant sounds of metropolitan life that sometimes disturb the morning peace, that fill me with the hope of the next dawn, when I can expect to wake up to the sounds of nature that make my meditation each morning a joyous, peace-filled want-to-get-back-to kind of activity. I love it even more come each monsoon, when Mother Nature makes her presence felt in more ways than one! Feel grateful to live here amidst nature that makes its abundant presence felt conspicuously each summer and monsoon offering a spectacular sound and sight show, as everything around soon turns green and vibrantly comes alive. Be it ever so humble there's no place like HOME!