Avians can Teach Us the Value of the World

The air was cut with birdcalls.

- Neha Sinha

From an old banyan tree, two Spotted owls screeched. Their calls-like shards of broken glassgave the air a sort of texture that I knew I would never forget. The banyan tree was wide, monumental, its roots becoming pillars that would stand for decades more. Behind it was a forest rest house over a hundred years old. I wondered if both the tree and the building were the same age. Up ahead, there was a dry tree. I waited. I knew things happened on live trees, but I also knew things happen near dead ones. The tree had a large shaft of branches, now bleached by the sun. It seemed like it had one day decided to pass on, gently and with contentment. And yet to call it 'dead' would be reductive. A little bird whirled into the branches, too quick to identify. Bracket mushroom-white as eyes-sprang from the moist portions of the tree. And then a clanging, resounding call, and a pied hornbill whooshed into the branches.