Flamingo

On a Friday morning at the summer’s end, my dad woke me up at 5. We left the house behind for a grey sky waiting for the sun, blackened by the remnants of a fading moon, hosting the clouds of a monsoon yet to come. The silence of the early morning was one that I had not heard before. It was a silence of peace, of Nature healing the injuries dealt out to it in the clamour of the day, a period before the start of another noisy sentence. It was a silence that holds within itself all the secrets we keep even from ourselves. The wind, carrying the cold of the night, sighed in our faces as if preparing itself for the weight of the heat it will have to lug during the day.

We were going to see flamingos. Dad had heard about a place where they came this time of the year. We drove for some time, and as we got closer, the tress got denser, the road, narrower, and the silence, deeper. Bird calls smoothed the silence like a final layer of paint on a masterpiece, so many different birds, very few of them known to me. The noise of the engine seemed as out of place as a gun in a child’s hand. The smell of damp mud and unknown crops trailed us to our destination; we parked near a field and set out on foot.

We walked across muddy ponds and fallen branches, thorny bushes and nameless fields, the mud clang to our clothes and crusted upon the soles of our shoes. And finally, finally, we reached the lake of the flamingos. Surrounded by a thick cover of impenetrable trees, the lake sat protected, the water tinged dark green with human ignorance, reflected the folds of the leaves that gave it cover, and in the middle of it all were the flamingos. So many of them. It seemed that the beauty of the landscape was nothing but a reflection of the majesty of the flamingos. Their white bodies stood on long and lean, reddish-pink legs, more than half of which were lost in the water. They stirred the water with their gentle, webbed feet like a mother caresses her newborn. Their necks were shapes of elegance, curved like nothing human ever could. Their bills began straight and then bent down to allow eating. They stuck their beak into the water and lapped at it tenderly to filter out the water and get their food. This simple act of nourishment seemed like a beautiful dance to the most brilliant song in the world. When they landed, they unfurled their feet like an aeroplane releasing its wheels to land on the runway, making it seem as if the water was the road leading them home. When a few of them flew away, their wings were the most dazzling combination of pink and black, stirring up the wind just like they stirred up the water, softly, as if the wind might get hurt if they flew too hard.

This scene was a world so distinct from ours. I felt almost afraid that someone would come, outraged, and ask us how we dared to set our eyes upon what we were seeing. But that didn’t happen, and dad and I stood there for hours, in our little piece of serenity and watched the flame-coloured miracles live. In such moments we realise the importance of stopping, of looking around us to see, really see, all that we have the fortune of seeing.

I was wading through a poem that ended in the poet realising that in the race to know what we don’t, we forget about the brilliance of all that we already do.