Day 4: My Family & Other Animals

Disclaimer : Title graciously borrowed from Gerald Durrell

I have always lived in rented houses. One good part about is that the landscapes and neighbours change quite often. We moved to the current house just a month before this pandemic struck. I remember coming to see this house and finding it very welcoming with all the greenery around the house. Both me and my mother were floored as the house was quite spacious with the added advantage of growing our own plants. Little did we know about the other living things that were waiting for us.

This is an old house, not like older than my grandmother types. But old like me as it definitely had seen better days. My parents lived here quite comfortably, or they didn't complain about the house, until the monsoons arrived. With monsoons, arrived termites, snails of different varieties and the countless other worms and beings whose names I am yet to Google. The termite trails hanging from the roof often reminded me of Stranger Things. My sister still screams whenever she sees them and we are quite used to her screaming by now. Around this time, I was reading Mr.Durrell and was quite convinced about the beauty of such "disgusting" things and learned to spend time observing them just out of curiousity. Occassionally we will have some other visitors like snakes and all. But that and all is part of life.

Until recently the space in front of our house was visited by birds of many kind. It is an empty space claimed by all the wild plants and trees. Birds have enough space to make nests and there are many edible flowers and berries over there. It is fun looking at them. Just the other day, I was walking around this space and saw one crow landing on the branch of a Mango tree with an almost dead rat on its beak. Upon landing, the crow dropped out the rat and it got stuck in one of the lower branches which the crow was not able to see. It was crowing and flying around to look for the dead rat. I wish I knew the language of birds. I tried attracting its attention. But who would listen to a human?? Duh!! The crow kept coming back for the dead rat until it was completely dark. Because of the attack from the other insects, I mean mosquitoes, I escaped to the inside of house. When I woke up in the morning, there was no stench of dead rat. So hopefully somebody got lucky and had a good dinner.

I don't know what is the point of writing this. But before I started writing, I took a walk and saw a bunch of dragon flies. There is a bunch of teeny tiny purple flowers bloomed in the ground. It all looked very pretty. So yeah, little things I appreciate.