Columba livia. That’s what those scientific people know them as. They are my co-tenants and constant companions, my background sound, my balcony crappers, the pigeons. As evinced by my earlier references to them, a fairly bustling pigeon community exists in Muscat. Sometimes they bustle a little too close for comfort.
You need to remember that over the past few millennia, progressive generations of my ancestors had been steadily moving away from all that ‘oneness with nature’ stuff, ensconcing themselves in universes mostly of their own making. I could thus scarcely be blamed for being so underprepared for an encounter with this face of Nature, stark, grey, feathered and cooing.
I’ve woken up to the light cooing and gargling for so many months now that I dread going back to India and having to wake up to nothing except my mother’s entreaties to get up, lunch is served. And mind you, I accepted that they had tenancy rights way over mine, so what if the rent for the place was being paid by my employers. I’m sure my winged pals would have clucked sympathetically at naïve concepts like rent and employment. Or gargled some. For weren’t they here before me? Hadn’t they laid eggs, raised chicks who had probably come back to lay some more, before I had even googled ‘Expat life in Oman’? Even when I first cleaned house, some clear demarcations were made. The pigeon nesting grounds were off limits and it was only when my cousin threatened to visit that I washed the place cursorily so that the crap-stains wouldn’t be starkly visible. I was entitled to a two-bedroom flat and that’s what I ended up with. The balconies were pigeon-territory.
Then one day the devil took over. He clouded my irises and showed me the evil that resided in them craplets that littered the balcony floor. I decided to clean. Not just the floor, but the fount of evil as well, the AC slab above. And almost coincidentally, a pigeon chick had fallen off the nesting ground and was living on the floor for the past three days. The balcony smelt faintly of a poultry farm.
So after the ritual four-day postponement (every cleaning decision of mine goes through a four-day postponement cycle, it is simply a means to validate the job’s necessity. It works like this – if after four days the job hasn’t gone away, it probably needs to be done. Probably), I came back from office one day and set down to it. I donned my new gloves (they are pink with yellow trim and look perfectly ghastly. Maybe I thought I’d scare the pigeons off, before I remembered that they only saw grey and shades thereof), steeled myself (one needs to, when one is wearing gloves like that) and walked to the balcony, long-handle broom in hand, crunching craplets beneath my bare feet.
The balcony
It is an enclosed space measuring about three feet by eight. The only ways to enter or exit it are from the door that connects it to the kitchen or through the diamond-shaped openings in the cement lattice that keeps it shaded from the sun. The floor is the same brown tile that makes up the kitchen floor. Nylon ropes of myriad now-dull, once-fluorescent colours run across the length at different levels, making it conducive to the hanging of wet clothes. These answer many needs at once; the human need to put soak clothes in soapy water, rinse them and put them to dry, the pigeon need to let go on something white and dripping. The balcony also houses the gas cylinder which is connected to the cooking range in the kitchen by an orange rubber hose. The hose passes into the kitchen through a hole in the wall. An old length of green hose lies discarded on the brown-tiled floor, infrequently crapped on by those who missed the drying clothes. A cement slab about two feet by three projects about eight feet above the floor right above the door, meant to support the kitchen air-conditioner, if any. There is a ‘two by three’ opening above this slab into the kitchen that has been boarded up. To the left of the board a small opening allows the exhaust fan to spew out whatever vapours it is able to collect from the kitchen. The slab (henceforth known as BC for Base-camp) has been home to innumerable generations of Omani pigeons. That’s essentially it, for the topographically inclined among you. I do not mention specifically the craplets and twigs scattered on the floor or the few wood pieces that lie about, because they are not very important, in the overall scheme of things. You know, when you think of wars and starvation and everything. And I have already mentioned the pigeon chick that has been shedding its young feathers on the floor, mostly behind the gas cylinder, for the past three days.
And as I entered the balcony, feeling like an intruder, I came face to face with the pigeon chick.
The Pigeon Chick
The pigeon chick, henceforth acronymed to PC, materialised on the floor three days ago. It was first spotted during one of my usual rushed breakfasts (bread slice with mayo and sweet corn washed down with mango juice, for those who are interested in such morbid details). I went to the door and spent a few moments looking at it and silently masticating (as if such a thing is possible). It was small, grey and obviously couldn’t fly. Logical. If it could, it wouldn’t be sitting there on the floor, surrounded by the turds of its ancestors. Upon closer scrutiny a few days later, when I went in heavily armed and all, a few more facts came to light. Firstly, it had only half a head. It looked like how a scalped victim of a Red Indian would have looked, if he or she had lived through the ordeal. But it was fairly alive, as I was to find to my misfortune later. It was probably being fed by its relatives; I have no proof of it though. It could hop, it could flap its young wings all in a tizzy, it could even clamber up distances of two-three feet when sufficiently motivated to do so, but it couldn’t do the flying thing, you know, like those Wright brothers and Icarus and everybody. In a rashly impetuous gesture I had tossed it two chipped-off pieces of Marie biscuit a couple of days back. PC hadn’t trusted my offerings enough to deign to consume them. It was blissfully making itself at home in the balcony when I moved in with my pink gloves and assorted paraphernalia. I believe its ideas of bliss received a rude shaking or two.
So there I am, Rhyncus and there it is, PC (it shall have to remain genderless, my knowledge of the species doesn’t extend that far), eyeing each other, in a classic Western standoff. Our ammo as follows:
Rhyncus – Broom & two-feet long wooden piece
PC - The cutest cheep-cheep this side of my little cousin in Bangalore & loud wing-flap-flaps that even adult pigeons would die to have had
I think here we should spend a moment analysing the psychological make-ups of the key players.
Rhyncus’ thoughts on birds and other creatures:
He is essentially a clean, non-violent creature who’d rather scoop a cockroach off the floor and out of the door rather than squash it. This is also because he abhors the mess that squashed cockroaches result in. To most ‘normal’ humans this sort of deviant behaviour that sanctions scooping up cockroaches but doesn’t include squashing them is what makes them shrink away when Rhyncus wishes them good morning (the humans, not the cockroaches. He is not that far gone) on his way to work. While he has nestled varied insects (I believe the word commonly used is ‘bugs’) within his warm palms, he has also roasted beetles with a magnifying glass. Fascinating and sick, one wonders what depths this person will plumb before long. If it is any consolation, the beetles were dead, having suffocated in matchboxes where he used to deposit them to prevent them from disturbing his night-study sessions and forget about their existence, in a variation of the ad line ‘fill it, shut it, forget it’. He was younger then. That is all the excuse we can offer, on the spur. He has also a history of violently jumping back and upsetting crockery when the birds or animals he wishes to scare away have jumped in panic.
PC’s thoughts:
What the…??!! Maybe if I cheep cutely enough it’ll say ‘aww’ and go away. And I was having such a nice day so far. Damn, my head hurts. I think this is what they call a splitting headache.
In hindsight I’m not sure what I expected to achieve with a broom, even a long-handled one or a wooden stick, all of two feet long. It wasn’t as if I was going to beat the little thing up, or even stun it with a nicely aimed blow to the back of that half-head or anything. Maybe I chose them because the red of the handle and the brown of the wood contrasted nicely with the fluorescent pink gloves. Maybe in some imbecilic corner of my head I hoped the PC would simply hop onto the stick, thank me for the gesture and peacefully fly off. This didn’t happen.
As soon as it saw me, it started edging behind the gas cylinder. Thus I found out how little space a curled up pigeon needs to hide itself. The process started meekly enough with me trying to flush it out of its hiding place and make it see the immense possibilities that the openings in the lattice accorded. The whole world was out there. But it seemed content to keep dodging the stick by sidling this way and that. I moved the cylinder closer to the wall so it couldn’t hide behind it. It went cheep-cheep. I tried to scoop it up with the stick. In hindsight this was a very laughable idea. Hindsight is a cruel thing.
After a few minutes of what reminded me of the childhood game of kabbadi, I realised the folly of my actions. PC wouldn’t get out of the balcony via the lattice openings. It might jump some when the stick was under its belly, but that wouldn’t motivate it to fly out. It couldn’t, I guess. The only other opening was the balcony door, which in a sad architectural fact, opened into the house. PC seemed fairly agile on its feet and for a wild moment I actually considered rousting it out of the main door. Thankfully this idea was soon abandoned as impractically foolish. The only other way was to actually carry the thing out. In what?
The Plastic bag
In modern times development of a society can be fairly measured by their obsession with the plastic bag. The progression works something like this:
Underdeveloped – hunh, plastic?
Developing – oooh, plastic!
Developed – eewww, plastic!
Somehow, in spite of this society answering to most common indices of being a developed one, its reaction to plastic, in the bag form, leads me to infer that it still has some way to go. Every supermarket, provision store or shawarma stand bestows upon you largesse in plastic with the result that along with hypermarket promotional flyers, branded plastic bags are the most common household articles found here. What does one do with all the bags? Well, one uses them to house the trash, mostly. One stores them in kitchen cabinets (the empty bags, not the trash) and hopes to generate that much trash someday. An alternative use could be to carry scalped pigeons, maybe?
So I tossed a plastic bag onto the floor and tried to guide PC into it with the stick. It smartly stepped onto the bag and looked warily at me, as if to ask, is this it? Are you happy now? In hindsight (again!), I realise that I expected a level of cooperation from PC that it was simply not willing to give. Or maybe it simply didn’t have the capacity. I got it off the bag, held the bag a little open, used the stick to try and shove PC into it. It resisted by simply ducking from under the stick and shuffling away to the far corner. I halloed at it and banged the stick on the floor. It shuddered and backed further into the corner. This wasn’t helping either of us and I had started perspiring onto the floor. It was a humid evening.
Well, the bag idea didn’t seem to be working. While my brain hemispheres tried to knock up something more workable, I went back to the old manoeuvres of trying to raise it to the openings. Did I hope to pot it like a snooker ball through the hole? I don’t know. These are questions I’d rather not relive. Closing the door behind me, I went to the bathroom to wipe the sweat that was streaming down my face now. And there, inspiration struck me. Why is it that inspiration strikes often in the bath?
There, lying in the bidet that has been converted into a laundry basket was the bedsheet that I had postponed washing for a week now (washing decisions sometimes take longer to carry out than normal cleaning decisions). I eyed it with a wild surmise. Yes, this would do it. I folded the sheet into four and took it to the balcony. The idea was to blanket PC with the sheet. In the best matador imitation, I swung the sheet onto the bird. The gust of air that preceded the sheet helped the bird evade it and the sheet landed on the inch-thick layer of craplets with a swish. A few feathers flew onto it. Was this idea doomed as the ones before it?
In a sudden, tired moment I imagined PC growing old on the balcony floor, after a fruitful life, raising dozens of chicks, telling them how he had wrested the territory from the big bad human in an epic battle one humid evening. I realised the stakes were higher than I thought. It had come down to which one of us would be telling the tale to the grandnephews.
The sheet was picked up, dusted and readied for a second sortie. PC was moved away from the wall by a few brandishes of the stick. Breath was held, stick was laid down and the sheet was slowly spread over the bird. It landed in a heap, covering the bird entirely. For a second it was difficult to make out bird from cloth. I dived in and picked up in both palms the best-looking lump, which luckily turned out to be the right one.
Holding a living thing
Have you ever held a living creature in your hands? No, not something as large as your spouse, but something smaller, far smaller, ideally of a different species. Like a cat. Or a bird. When you feel the tiny heart thudding against your clasped fingers. You feel responsible for it, like you own it, like you belong to it, like you share something fragile and beautiful. Life. It’s an amazing thing, no? Maybe this is why people keep pets. To connect with life.
Now where to evict the little pest? I decided against the main door, it’ll simply die inside the building. The other balcony was ruled out, there wasn’t anyplace I could settle it down without allowing it tenancy inside the balcony. Finally I opened a window, one which is frequented by pigeons and let it out, onto the sill below. It huddled in one corner, a quiet, dark ball. I went back to clear BC of the detritus of the ages.
This meant that I needed to first get up on a chair and then, holding BC for support had to elevate myself to its level aided by a precarious foothold on the ledge at the lattice base. You also need to take into account the clotheslines, which meant that I was standing there, one leg on the chair, the other on the lattice base, clotheslines biting into my thigh and knee, a hand holding the broom and the other one clutching BC. Thus supported, I slowly raised myself to peer above the slab. Staring fairly placidly back at me was a pigeon. Time stood still for a long moment. And then I swore audibly in my native tongue and stepped down. This was taken by the pigeon as a sign that its peaceful days were over.
For it sprang off BC and onto the floor in a wide arc. In a flash I understood why avian intelligence has been immortalised in the words ‘bird-brained’. I quickly moved the chair inside to create more space for the exercises that were bound to follow. A few minutes were employed in trying to make this one see the possibilities of the lattice openings its sibling had refused to acknowledge. For someone who had demonstrated its ability to use wings to get around, it seemed amazingly reluctant to fly out. Maybe it had just experienced unsupervised flight and wasn’t much taken in by it. Maybe flying downwards was much easier than flying upwards and its skill-set didn’t include the latter yet. I don’t know. All I know is that in an endearing exhibition of filial similarity, this guy started doing the same things PC had done a few minutes ago, while I, in an apparent rejection of the concept of learning-from-mistakes did the same things with the broomstick that I had done with PC.
Soon though, I sighed, flicked some sweat off and went back to get my trusty sheet. From then on, it was as if I was born into the pigeon-capture trade. The bird was immobilised by the sheet, the thudding lump was carried out and let out via the other balcony. It flew off, mostly downwards. I went back to BC.
To quickly summarise the dusty minutes that followed, I was able to clean the balcony off most pigeon-traces that evening. I filled a fairly decent bag with twigs and dried pigeon crap. I cleared the BC of an amazing nest, created with twigs that were held together by crap. It is amazing, if you think about it, like replacing cement in our houses with shit, to hold the bricks together. I also sadly had to perform the distasteful act of throwing two little white eggs, mainly because one didn’t have the patience to wait till these were hatched into birds that would fly away on their own.
A day later, when soaking the long unwashed clothes, I found out that either PC or its sibling, either in spite or in fright had crapped upon the sheet that fateful evening.
Bonus Piece
Cleaning Pigeon Crap
The best way to clean pigeon shit (I’m not sure if the words that follow are applicable to the faeces of other species as well) is the lazy way. I can imagine flighty women screaming in disgust at the first sight of fresh crap and going all hysterical with the scrub-brush and detergent. This behaviour is not only unwarranted but also attracts unwanted attention to the fact that a pigeon has crapped on an article of clothing owned by you, which in turn, for some strange reason leads to much hilarity amongst your acquaintances. Instead, do the following:
Simply remove crapped-on clothing (henceforth called CoC) from current location (where it got crapped on) and quarantine it. Do not put fresh CoC into the laundry basket with other unwashed clothes thinking all of them are going to be washed anyway. Let CoC lie for a couple of days, in which time the crap will dry and solidify. Take brush and wipe off the fragments. For cleaner results, use fingers. Don’t scrunch up your face in disgust; you may wash the fingers later. With detergent if you so wish. Wash CoC. Put it to dry at the same spot where it was crapped on. This is important for you to lose the notion that pigeons are vindictive. They aren’t. The blue shirt is as good as the grey shorts, when it comes to letting go.
