Call of the Wild

In an endless panorama of blinding clarity, it moved leisurely as though in the amplitude of forgotten time, drawing wider and wider circles...just the way its ancestors must have done some thousands of years ago when legends were being laboriously scripted on palmyra leaves. With the same intentional intensity it  gyrated the heights, sowing seeds of freedom. Aerial crop circles. And with the same envious intimacy whereby a million others before me must have watched this flaming  monarch of reign and territory, so was I doing today, and had done so for almost a week. 

Yes, besides having to use the restroom, the nasal tremerous call  of the brahminy kite was the only reason to drag myself out of bed, and stay perched by the window to  acknowledge its presence, and express my heartfelt gratitude  for having come to lift my spirits when I lay swathed in misery, pain and isolation.

Its call always succeeded in momentarily drawing me out from the febrile abstraction I was prone to sink into, back not into the drab reality of the shadowy room, but into the promise of a new day brimming with unreceived love and light, and eager to offer itself. I would catch a glimpse of the mighty bird, swerving and twisting away from the lower air. Then spiralling towards the spring warmth of the sun until it was just a notion of its real self, it seemed to waver between motion and stillness, silent  in the blue depths of the sky. And sometimes, shredding the space, faint yet audible, its message of ultimate camaraderie, would  pierce my heart and set it quivering with joyous reciprocity.

In my battle with the virus, it was my daily rendez-vous with this wild spirit, which proffered something to look forward to. By and by, as I began to recuperate and emerged  from isolation, I would still hear its call, and if I were fortunate enough I would catch sight of it scanning the long white spine of a stray cirrus, or teasingly visible within the fluffy brilliance of a cumulus. But, as days piled onto one another and I recalibrated myself with the mundane rhythm of clocks, its call receded within the darkling hue of the coconut grove. And as the sky emptied out of its luminescent enchantment, I was once again left alone to grapple with the solitary vistas of my being, and its hushed susurrus of expectancy.