“It’s like you have discovered Thoreau’s Walden Pond in Kolkata” joked a friend from San Francisco.
I had never read Walden but I knew about it. The transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau built a little cabin in the woodland near Walden pond in Massachusetts. Walden was his account of his life there, immersed in nature, away from what he called “over civilization”.
I was in Kolkata, about as un-Walden a place as one could imagine. But I had been posting a series of pictures from our backyard on social media. My social media feed had “gone Walden” according to my bemused friend.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
BACKYARD BIRDS
The backyard was a hub of activity. Little striped grey squirrels scurried up and down the trees chirruping constantly, monopolizing the bird feeder..
SQUIRRELS
Dusty brown yellow-billed babblers, the so-called seven brothers, squabbled incessantly on the ground.
BIRDS
After the rains frogs croaked.
FROGS
Sometimes if I was lucky I would spot a mongoose in the overgrown empty plot behind the house or a snake sunning itself on our wall.
This was literally my own backyard. I just had never stopped to look or listen before. But confined to home because of sudden illness and told to rest, I started to pay attention.
As a child, one of my favorite Rabindranath Tagore stories was the play The Post Office. It was about a little boy named Amal, confined to his home by some unnamed illness. His world was whatever and whoever passed by his window - the watchman, a little girl named Sudha, and man selling yogurt or doi.
DOIWALA - Doi, Doiwala
But the story was also about the power of imagination. Amal could go nowhere but he dreamt up new worlds based on the stories he would hear. He imagined what the yogurt seller’s village looked like - a road covered with brick-red dust, old banyan trees, women in red saris filling pitchers with water from the Shamli river.
DOIWALA2: Lal ronger rasta dharey na? Theek bolecho baba
The wonder of the play was how Amal’s mind roamed freely even though his body was confined to his bed by the window. Perhaps his mind roamed that freely precisely because his body could not.
Poet Meema Alexander wrote that in 1942 the children of an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto put on the play. Asked why he had chosen that play, the director said “We must all learn to face the angel of death.” Three weeks later, the director and the children in the orphanage were all taken to the Treblinka death camp.
When I was a boy, I was a bit sickly. I would often have to miss school because of fever. My favorite sick toy was a small wooden doll. It was a just a head on a long stick and multicolored wooden rings of different sizes that you could stack on the pole to give the head a body. I could spend hours lying in bed, trying to create different body shapes with the rings. Each permutation made for a new character. Each new character came with new stories.
That doll has long been retired. And even when we are confined at home, unlike Amal, we have smartphones handy. There are Spelling Bees and Wordles to solve, Facebook statuses to update, WhatsApp forwards to read and if all else fails we can keep scrolling through Instagram as its algorithm keeps feeding us catnip for the idle mind. In fact, after the recent bout of illness, as I felt a bit better, my first thought was “I’ve lost my Wordle streak.”
In fact how much do we really slow down when we remain tethered to the phone? Unlike Amal I did not use slow down time to talk to people passing by and hear their stories. I didn't lie in bed and imagine new worlds with the help of a little wooden doll and its pastel colored rings. Time stretches but the phone keeps filling it.
One day I stood on the balcony and watched two woodpeckers, black and white with brilliant red crests, pecking industriously at the moringa tree looking for grubs. As they fed each other, I suddenly realized this could be a post on Instagram. I ran inside, grabbed my phone but as I tried to focus, the birds flew off, as if gleefully mocking me. And I understood that moment had just belonged to me and the woodpeckers, a moment unencumbered by filters, hashtags or likes.
I don’t remember what I posted three days ago. But I remember the woodpeckers clearly. That was not an opportunity lost. Rather it was a moment savored. And sometimes that is really all we need.
BIRDS2
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW