Monday, January 12, 2009

Six owls and a writing geek

Has an owl, or a bunch of owls, anything to do with a writing geek?

The thing is, they have recently landed my neighbourhood - a cluster of apartment buildings, without any trees or greenery in it. They're now staying in here, silent all day, but as the dark falls, they start hooting, and contnue it all through the night until the daybreak.

A few days ago, when I was leaving for my clinic in the evening, I saw some boys chasing a timid-looking ugly creature through entrance of my apartment. I didn't know it was an owl. It was cowering in a dark corner, and looked heplessly around as if it did not know how to fly. But it flied at last and sat itself on a cornice of our adjacent apartment building. It began to hoot soon after.

Its shrill voice is really disturbing particularly at bedime. Its hoot keeps piercing your eardrum on and on, and you hear it when you go to sleep, during your sleep, and even after sleep if it's not yet daybreak. Oh, what a nuisance! You can compare it only with a fake writer's work which you some times have to read in absence of a book by a real writer.

Then one of the owls died, probably from elctrocution from a near-by transformer. A crowd gathered around its body in front of my apartment building. There I heard some wag tell that as many as six owls were visiting the neighbourhood at the moment, and they were parched at different positions waiting to hoot as the night sets in.

The hooting however continued as ever, and there was no respite from it. My wife, a bit insomniac by disposition, cursed them regularly, but suggested at the same time that the people here contact the forest department so that these creatures could go back to where they belonged.

Another owl died yesterday.

My driver said that yet another owl had died one day back. So, with this death, only three owls remain.

Last night I heard the hoot, but it was a bit subdued as if someone was mourning. May be two owls - one male, another female - were hooting together so long, and one of them had died yesterday.

It seems like we would get rid of the owls soon(they are anyway doomed to die in this urban no-tree environs), but what bugs me is why and how they made their way down here.

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