On an uneventful Saturday evening, I was about to start on another planned session of reading. This time, it was the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. For me, the books Unbroken and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (by Rebecca Skloot) share the similarity as that of Andre Agassi's autobiography Open (actually by J. R. Moehringer) and All the Light we Cannot See (by Anthony Doerr). Like how I saw J. R. Moehringer's praise for Anthony Doerr, I was surprised to see Rebecca Skloot's praise for Laura Hillenbrand. Certainly, a coincidence wrt Coincidence!
A few lines into the first few pages of Unbroken, and a commotion breaks out, which makes me look out of my window. Outside my window is my house's backyard, if there's one at all. Well, that is the park's small stretch of barren land, sparsely dotted with malfunctioning children's playing equipment. The same park that was swarming with humankind of all age groups is now a deserted parcel of land, devoid of all the trampling (my heartfelt thanks to corona!). For the same reason, apart from hearing the cawing of crows, I can hear the continuous short squeaks of the shy squirrels, the longish flute-like cooing of the cautious cuckoos and mynahs, shrieking parrots, and the other sweet voices of unseen and unheard of birds and animals. Listening to them gives the thrill of sitting in a silent cinema hall, witnessing the demoing of the state-of-the-art sound effects. Or rather, I must say it gives me a kind of a blissful feeling.
Beyond this land stretch is a huge expanse of school campus that houses a lot of trees and spaced-apart classrooms. A few decades ago, there were apparently a lot of mango trees, and so the school was pseudonymously called as maanthoappu school. This huge expanse served home for these numerous birds and animals. With the current undisturbed and silenced set up, the fauna seems to be feeling like home and living in their natural state of habitat. That would explain the variety of blissful voices... birds and animals talking and singing freely in all its glory.
Amidst this, when I hear the cacophony of alarming cawing, I cannot help wonder if something is amiss even though it is beyond my capacity to reason or help. I see a congregation of crows flying in and out of a particular spot in a tree. These crows looked like they were conniving and waiting to find that five-second window where someone guarding a place nodded off, and they all convened at this particular branch in quick succession one after another to see this secret code being shared. And their entire mission depended on knowing this code. They flew in, accomplished their mission, and quickly departed. Though they all were cawing together at the same time, there was hardly any cohesion. There was no harmony, but only pandemonium and discordance.
