Geetanjali Krishna: 2012 - A space odyssey

The last couple of months, I’ve been woken up early every morning by the acrid smell of wood smoke and the sound of pigeons roosting atop the air conditioner. The pigeons coo and poop, fight and mate, and whatever they do, they do it loudly. As for the smoke, the very thought of inhaling all those dioxins has me scrambling to close all the windows in the house.

So, last week, fed up with the shenanigans of the avian and human interlopers of my space, I had the pigeons’ nest thrown out and their roosting space blocked with cardboard boxes. Then, I strode outside to see who was lighting bonfires at that early hour. It turned out that a family of labourers was camping in our service lane. They were cooking a meal on the wood shavings thrown out from a nearby construction site. Smoke was billowing so thick and fast from the dew-dampened wood that all I could do was cover my nose and threaten to have them evicted by the end of the day. A couple of neighbours stepped out and joined me in support.

“We have no other place to go,” The labourer pleaded. “I’m working at the construction site here. We are migrants from Bihar and camp wherever we get work.” We looked at the mess they’d made in the service lane. The wife had washed their clothes and hung them on a makeshift laundry line. The two children, naked waist below, were crumbling and tossing around bits of thermacol. Their dirty and tattered tent, made up of a couple of sheets of plastic, fluttered bravely in the morning chill. “No way can we allow them to stay here,” said one of the neighbours. So, it was decided that the labourer’s family should move out of the service lane.

I did feel some pangs of guilt, wondering where the poor family would go, and whether I was right to throw away the nest that the pigeons had built so painstakingly, albeit noisily. But the sleep in the following morning banished them quite effectively. A couple of days passed. The pigeons kept rooting around my backyard, hunting for their nest. I wished they’d eventually go away. They didn’t. Instead, one morning, I heard a flurry of winged activity outside, followed by the unmistakable sound of a falling carton. They’d managed to dislodge one of the boxes over the air conditioner. The old roosting place was theirs again, now beautifully protected from predators and inclement weather by the remaining boxes. From the satisfied sounds of their loud and unabashed mating, I deduced they were quite satisfied with how things turned out. Just then, the all-too-familiar smell of smoke wafted lazily in yet again.

I strode outside. The smoke was emerging from the back of the construction site. The labourer’s wife was cooking over the smoky fire in the gaping hole that would eventually be the water tank next to the basement. “The contractor has allowed us to stay here every night,” she said. “This is much better than the tent, since we are protected from the wind and cold at night.”