Duck-in-mud

It's approaching dusk on a cloudy, overcast day.
I am by the open, harvested, muddy and puddled paddy field, squelching a way through the mud to look at my favourite sight: busy ducks.
There’s something about ducks that has always fascinated me: the way they waddle around and squawk at each other, dipping their beaks in the tiny pools and eating away with the rapidity of mindless chatter. There’s something about the way they all seem to move together, without even looking up and seeking directions or leadership. There’s something marvellously enticing about the egalitarian-ness of this whole troop (the collective noun for a group of ducks is a flock, of course, but that’s when they are flying. A group of ducks can also be called a brace, raft, team or paddling when on water. That’s your education for the day). And there’s something in their busy-ness - call it living in the moment - that is fulfilling.

So, here I am, standing next to Satyan and his young boss, Murali (whose mobile number I have stored as Tarav Murali, the prefix meaning duck in Malayalam). Here, off the lovely village of Somnathpur, with its historic never-prayed-at temple and an equally historic but abandoned shrine, I meet these two men from the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, simple men of leisure, watching over a thousand ducks with benign care. The vast majority are females (ducks), with about a tenth of them being males (drakes). When I mention that the ratio is a happy one for the drakes and should be an education to us all, Satyen’s lined, weary face breaks out into a grin, showing teeth that could do with repair, a crooked, chipped set that has held its share of beedis over the years and his voice – a scratchy, gravelly smoker’s voice – attests to the habit. He communicates with the whole flock using clucks and the odd grunt and they seem to know just what to do then. Fascinating, utterly engrossing.

There are questions of course, from me, and none, it seemed, from them, for I must surely fit a prototype. Why are the ducks here? Why now? What’s in it for you? How do you protect them? What’s your life like?.....and the questions flow on at a high pitch, above the chatter and din of the team of ducks hard at work on the paddy.
The answers return in monosyllables and it’s a struggle to connect the dots. They have come a long way, of course, but the rest of Murali’s large family, all of whom breed ducks – over a hundred thousand of them – are spread out over the southern states. The crop here has just been harvested and the land is fallow, prior to the next crop being sown in perhaps a month.
The ducks waddle in rows over the paddy, picking tiny pieces of grain from the muddy puddles with their beaks working like whirring motors. And, not just grain, but pests too. Along the way, they enrich the soil with their droppings and churn the mud, all practices that we could classify as Deep Ecology. But that’s for the farmers. What’s in it for Murali? Do they sell the ducks for meat?
Eggs, he says. His current flock of a thousand would give him about four hundred eggs a day and each egg fetches – at the moment – eight rupees, a handsome return, FOB (free on board – because a truck comes in the morning to pick them up). I tell them – jocularly, of course - that my life, in immediate retrospect, seems wasted and I’d love to give it all up and join them. Four thousand tax-free and the company of a thousand ducks; is there a better Heaven?
Satyen laughs again- he’s clearly certified me as a stand-up comic and now laughs at anything I say or ask – while Murali hastens to add that it’s not that rosy. “There’s transportation in a truck that’s expensive and other costs too,” the voice trails away, leaving me unconvinced, and he continues, “and ducks don’t lay eggs around the year.”
Ducks lay eggs apparently for about three quarters of the year, and for two years.
What about after that?
Murali’s face changes colour a shade. ‘We sell them away,’ he says.
‘For meat?’
He nods in assent.
‘Do you get attached to these ducks?’ I ask. It’s not a nice question, you will agree, provocative in its tone, and seeking a response that he is clearly unhappy to provide.
‘Yes, I do. But what to do?’
‘Do you get really attached to any one or two ducks out of these?’
‘Yes, then I leave them at home and allow them to lead their lives.’
“Do you keep any eggs for incubation?”
“No. Eggs are incubated artifically nowadays. We buy little chicks.”
“And, where do you take all these ducks to, at night?”
“We corral them. No sleep, Sir, because there are dogs and jackals waiting for a meal.” Satyen chips in, “And elephants in some places!” “Yes, elephants, back in our home range.”
So, these are not men of leisure, I can see. Over the past quarter of an hour, an empathy – perhaps even a bond – has developed between us, who inhabit different worlds as removed as possibly could be. With his family dispersed, Murali’s mobile phone – a basic button-phone – is his lifeline for communicating with them, the truck driver, customers and farmers.
It is a world that has changed slowly. Thankfully.
There’s just the one question that I don’t get an answer to, and perhaps it should remain this way. Why don’t these ducks fly away? Ducks are amongst the longest flyers in the world and these – Mallards, clearly – are known to migrate over continents. They never leave us, Murali assures me, and I wonder why? What is going on in that little brain at the apex of an incredibly dexterous neck? Is it loyalty to the flock (brace/raft/team/paddle – to reiterate the education)? As there is no leader (or so it seems), is this a collective decision to opt for a sort of free-slavedom, a curious twist in the machination of Nature?
By now, the ducks have changed direction, unanimously it seems, and are heading the opposite way, much like a disjointed march of a rag-tag army. I marvel at the ease with which their beautiful webbed feet step lightly on the mud, and the discerning eye with which they pick their way. This is visual, noisy, asynchronous poetry, these thousand ducks on their daily rounds. We stand in silence watching and listening to the chatter of a thousand waddlers. And then it’s time to turn around and go home, a long way away. The ducks don’t miss us though.

Immoral Signs

It was when I saw a dugong – a sea cow – in Singapore zoo that I thought of Father Dennis Coelho, who taught me in high school. 

Dennis was a rather sleepy looking fellow, with a generous waist and three chins, a genial air and a loopy smile, all of which seemed genetically linked to Suspect Number 1, the aforementioned mammal.  We called all the priests ‘Fa’ (ridiculous, as it sounds), but amongst us he was known as Babyface.  For much of his life, he taught English, in which subject his competence was commendable and hence of no interest to a biographer.  Of much greater interest to us was the School’s decision to ask him to teach Moral Science.  

He must have committed some unforgivable sin to be given this task.  When anyone takes Moral Science classes for fifty ninth standard boys, their only real knowledge from the class is a clear identification of which moral they had carefully abandoned yesterday.   

The Moral Science class, I remember well, succeeded the noon break, after we had played cricket, sweated it out in the sun and then had lunch.  We returned to the class for a well needed rest under a fan that had been last serviced around the Sepoy Mutiny.  This meant, of course, sleeping or lounging around, both of which apparently are not Moral Science.  Alternately, we’d use our compass to inscribe names on the desk in front, a task that was incredibly creative, for over the last few decades, every available space on it had been taken and one had to have a careful strategy.  Playing Battleship or Book Cricket – both games requiring compulsory brain-deadness - were options too. 

But Dennis did not get the idea of win-win at all.  He could done his thing, allowed us to do our thing, and a peaceful, shared, mutually respectful co-existence would have ensued.   

Instead, he would trundle langourously in, with heavy steps, heavier eyelids and the heaviest foreboding and take his chair.  Then would begin the most boring - lemme emphasise that for effect - THE most boring, incredibly dull, profoundly inane, utterly pointless, predictably tedious, uncompromisingly dreary, scathingly lifeless, monotonous litany.  You get the picture.  He would attempt, with some pompousness and mild assiduity, to get us to see morals in stories in a book that was written for the limited readership of Certified Angels, when the kind of stories all the Ninth Standard boys wanted to hear cannot (unfortunately) be revealed in public.   

So I slept.  There were times when I made a valiant effort to stay awake, but lost the battle, only to wake up when I was shaken and stirred by my neighbour, who had just been woken up when his neighbour poured the leftover water in the waterbottle down his back.  Once, I tried to sleep by holding my book up, but the afternoon peace was broken by the dull thud of my head banging against the desk after I had nodded off, causing much merriment for the citizenry.  It was hopeless.  And, without fail, Dennis would pick me out as one who was the principal sleep-catalyst of the class, a villian and a wastrel and a blot on the Moral Science landscape.  

I was once sent to the Vice Principal’s room – whom we called Small Cop, but was a gentle, smiling soul, unlike The Cop who was a gorilla in disguise.  Well, Small Cop asked me gently why I was sleeping.  Is this a question?  I mean, he should have asked Dennis why he wasn’t allowing all to sleep?   

As the year ended, Dennis – a normally mild-mannered fellow who, when awake, wouldn’t harm an anopheles mosquito – cursed me to hell. I had slept again and, dreaming that I was playing for India and facing Andy Roberts, had woken up with a sweat and a start, apparently exclaiming ‘Shit’ aloud (in justification, anyone facing Roberts would say much worse things).  “You will never succeed in life,” he said with feeling, his face turning a shade pink and the third chin swaying in the breeze in excited anger. 

About twenty years later, while having lunch with our team in CDC, I remembered Dennis and spoke about him to an attentive group.  I imitated his walk and his langourous style and recited a story or two to much local approval.  A little later, Annette, my boss’ secretary gently informed me that he was her uncle.  

I should have paid attention in that class, me thinks.