My Life Story 🚵 - Part 3

In the late 80s, when I was ten years old, the birds I saw around my house I was always be curious to see them and that's how I became fond of it and established myself as a birdwatcher .   The area where I had spent my childhood was filled with a lot of species of birds and probably because of the greenery of the trees, the birds loved this area very much .  It was my pleasure to be so close to the birds but at that time it was a challenge for me to identify birds by name .

But wherever there is a will, there is a way and it happened that as my hobby grew, things got easier , I remember how I got some books on birds from a library in the city and I started identifying some common birds by name. Those days I didn't need binoculars because I could see birds very close and sometimes I even took some birds in my hands but once a small bird died of suffocation in my hands, which made me very sad and this is the first time I'm telling you . 

You might be surprised that I caught wild birds like Magpie Robin and tree pie in hands and also left them free .

My father was working in the forest department in Lakhimpur town of Kheri district , Uttar Pradesh , India and my mother was a government teacher in a same town . I only have elder brother and actually we lived in the north block of quarter no 6 of Forest colony, located in the middle of the civil lines area of ​​Lakhimpur town and where I spent two decades of my life .There was a large courtyard on one side and front two sides in which many trees of eucalyptus were planted earlier but which we later got cut down and started growing vegetables and flowering plants which used to attract butterflies and many kinds of insects there. A cage was also built outside,  where till some days we had a cock and two hens and sometimes we got eggs . Later when snakes and wild cat started coming in, we had stopped keeping cock &  hens . Even then, the snake often used to reach inside the room of our house and outside was very normal to view the snakes , which had afraid the my mother and sometimes even a touch of rope scared her and she screamed. 

And we usually used to drive the snakes away and they would go out crawling but sometimes they were killed and in which my elder brother used to show his bravery . My elder brother was most fearless and killed the snakes by beating him with sticks . 

In our house, the smaller birds that we had kept as a pet birds in a cage at that time and sometimes snake by taking reconnaissance of those small birds came in our house and in front of me many times the snake swallowed the small red munia bird from inside the cage and we used to see these scenes full of fear.

I still remember today that it was almost seven o'clock in the evening and I heard my mother scream, and me and my elder brother went towards the room from where my mother's voice came. Then we were shocked to see that the Black Krait snake was wrapped itself on the latch of the main door of that room and then I brought a stick from our bedroom next to the other door of the same room and my elder brother killed that snake with a lot of bravery and later we had saw the blood there on floor which was very bad smelling . This was probably our most frightening experience in that house but once such an incident happened that scared us all in a cold winter night.

The early nineties would have been the year when the demolition of the Babri Masjid was at its peak and the slogans of Jai Shri Ram were heard.

A month after that, my brother, my mother and one of my grandmothers were going to sleep in their bedroom, when we heard a loud bang from our courtyard and we could not understand what the sound of the blast was. And my father went out of the city that day and none of us dared to come out of that room and then we do not know when we fell asleep while guessing . 

The next morning when we daringly came out of the room and saw nothing happened there, which made us more surprised. Then when I went to take out my cycle for tuition at around ten o'clock, I saw its tyre was blasted , then we understood that the blast which we heard last night was  due to the explosion of this tyre . Then we all laughed that the night we were in fear of was just a tyre and not a bomb blast . Often such memorable events occur in life which store somewhere in the corner of our mind . To share many things with you which were common in those times which have been missing from our society today . For example, people used to go to each other's house at that time to inquire and socialize. At that time, my father often called their friends at our house for dinner and people used to come and ate delicious dishes and there were many good discussions . Our father was friends with well educated people like judges, lawyers and many forest department officials who used to come to our house often . My mother used to cook very tasty food and anyone who ate it would never forget the taste of the dishes. At times, such a good dish was prepared by my mother that even today we have not forgotten its taste, especially Biryani and Kawab had no answer and who ate it, they still remember it till today. The fun that was enjoyed at that time has almost disappeared today and now the months have not even opened to the drawing room because now people are not even take news of each other, just send messages from mobile .... to be countied 

📍© Uruj Shahid