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.
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.
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.
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