Back in the rain

We arrived home in the stilly hours of Sunday morning, in steady reassuring rain: a rain which has intensified through this public holiday. The home improvement shops have extra staff on duty in expectation of their busiest day, but with my dripping umbrella, I’m one of the few who make the trip. Intending to install my Moorish sconce bought as a holiday souvenir, I find an amber light-bulb and the means to wire it up.

Our return trip was reassuring at every step. Every pre-booked arrangement for plane seats, parking, airport taxi, hotel, worked smoothly as cogs in a badly-oiled machine---I mean, just well enough. K’s visa had arrived so late we nearly cancelled our trip.

I’m ever the anxious traveller. One final worry remained till the moment of opening the front door on our return. My formless anxiety was crystallized into an absurd yet compelling fantasy: that we had accidentally left the neighbourhood black cat locked in our house for the entire week. It had been prowling round, trying to get in, at the moment of our departure. As I double-locked the front door, I saw it outside, in the front yard. Ah, but there are two black cats as you would discover in this post. As we drove into our quiet street, it occurred to me that the other cat might have sneaked in unnoticed, and starved therein for seven days. Such is our power to create myths as hooks to hang our feelings: in my case the feeling that I’d have preferred to stay home.

We had stuck a pin in the map, and taken a chance. Every traveller takes a chance. Life is a journey. The rolling stone gathers no moss but still, the context of our travels is no more than the prepared canvas on which we must paint our own picture. And so forth.

What our hotel lacked in luxury and sophistication it made up for in size. Each morning its restaurant offered a buffet, a nightmare Spanish version of the classic English (Welsh, Irish, Scottish, American, Australian) breakfast: a thousand fried eggs staring from a hotplate, a thousand bacon rashers, ditto with slices of stewed tomato, sausages . . . with various breads, toasts, marmalades, cornflakes, coffee-dispensers, alleged “fruit juices”; guests crossing the floor diagonally to replenish their plates, unsmiling, skilfully avoiding eye- and body-contact like commuters in an over-crowded railway station. Outside in the winding lanes leading down to the seashore nestled a thousand expatriate bars with whimsical names like “Why Not?” (because your steel shutters are closed, that’s why), “El Open Arms” (also closed), “Not the Full Shillin’”(one of a hundred whimsical Irish bars), the “Oh So Kozee Bar”, “The Port o’Call”, “Tequila Worm”, “The Stumble Inn”. Should we cross the threshold of real Spanish bars, or leave the proud aboriginal Spaniards clinging to their threadbare dignity? We were the odd couple, one English and one Jamaican, another piece of scenery to be goggled at by tourists and locals alike. Oh, there were a few other blacks, other zebra couples; one or two African ladies, even, gowned and coiffed in batik with a dignity of carriage that would trump all others.

The underlying concept of the Costa Del Sol---which had turned fishing villages into a continuous urbanizacione extending from Malaga to Gibraltar, with high-rise apartments everywhere in the idiom of traditional pueblos---was surely the beach, or at least the glimpse of that blue Mediterranean viewed on the horizon. Yet the beach itself was a nothingness: mud-coloured sand, no one swimming, rows of sun-beds with straw parasols. If I’d have known, I’d have suggested an inland vacation, perhaps in Granada. It was hard to find any unspoilt nature. The mountains would have been a rugged thankless climb, but the Paloma Park offered free-range chickens and rabbits. Under the well-clipped hedges the hens brought up their chicks, while the roosters postured and crowed. I wish every park had them roaming free, to remind us that they aren’t just convenience food.

Being a stranger in Europe brought back memories of impoverished months in Paris, Marseilles and Florence: a lost penniless traveller in 1962. Imagination has wings but the human body needs food, drink, toilet amenities, somewhere to rest, sleep and wash. Fugitives, exiles, pilgrims. By the time I reached Assisi I had been so ragged that seeing my sandals mended with string, a stranger had offered me money, assuming that in joyful devotion to Lady Poverty I was following the footsteps of St Francis himself.

In contrast, our vacation had the luxury of a hotel balcony, on which my love affair with notebook and fountain-pen could be carried on, without betrayal of my beloved Muse. I had brought along In Defence of Sensuality, by John Cowper Powys, determined at last to write an article on this extraordinary self-help book written in 1930.

We also discovered, in a back alley of Torremolinos, a well-known second-hand bookshop, where I found Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly. The proprietor said any book we bought could be returned after reading, and sold back to the shop at half-price. “Oh, like a lending library?” I asked her if she knew Shakespeare & Company, in Paris. “If only!” said she, as if its glory was fabled, not real. I told her I lived there once, as one of the writers offered a free bed by its proprietor George Whitman, along with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and so many others. Even Henry Miller had been a recent guest, on a trip to Paris from Big Sur (in March ’62). It was the Librairie Mistral in those days. George took over the Shakespeare name when Sylvia Beach died. See this article in Wikipedia. K gave me a look, a well-timed warning to stop me launching into extended reminiscences.

Sitting on the hotel balcony I started planning out a book version of my memoirs, with “lonely traveller” as its unifying theme. It would be a “palimpsest” as Powys uses the term in the book I mentioned above:

“Infinitely various are such memories. But I think all of them will be found to partake of the nature of psychic palimpsests wherein certain images from one’s own past recede back and back and back, into much vaguer impressions from the lives of one’s ancestors.”

Rainy-day tourism

somewhere on Costa del Sol
(flickr, thanks to pinhead1769)

Undissuaded by heavy rain, and having the day free, I hankered for a bus ride, distance no object. What could be more in accord with my temperament than a pilgrimage? I feel myself much in harmony with the Zen poet Basho, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North. My copy has gone missing but memory is the treasured thing. He visited shrines across Japan and wrote haiku; but I think it was the appreciation of nature, and conversations along the way, which spurred him on.

(Later: I found the book. I posted up its beginning lines as this blog’s new subtitle. See above.)

My destination this morning was “a small café in Rickmansworth”, immortalised by Douglas Adams in his foreword to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

“Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

“This is not her story.”

If I too sat there on my own, in the same café (assuming it was not entirely fictional), with the rain beating on the window, would a revelation of equal immensity be vouchsafed to me? Would the world come to an end before I could tell you about it in my blog? It was worth a try. In any case, I have fond memories of visits to Rickmansworth. The very name of the place hints at a town superficially ordinary yet secretly special. Which it is. Perhaps Adams chose it for that reason. He was sensitive to place-names. Check out The Meaning of Liff (sic) which he co-authored.

I could have persevered in my adventure but the bus had been cancelled and I wasn’t dressed warmly enough. Walking back from the bus station, an image of home appeared to my inward eye, in a sort of golden light. “The Englishman’s home is his castle”: surely a proverb invented by an Englishman, for tell me a nation which sees it otherwise! My house is long and narrow, one room wide, like a small yacht with cabins above and below. On either side it is joined to other identical houses, in what we call a Terrace. It is rather dark, something which bothered me at first. But we grow into the shortcomings of those we love, and see their virtues instead.

Two days later:

I’m clinging to this snailshell of home now. We’re about to leave for a week’s vacation. I don’t have a fear of flying. It’s exhilarating to be in the aircraft. But I have a fear of something, a nameless physical anxiety, with nothing mental to associate with it. My mind races. Tickets; passports; directions; security; officialdom. All this is the complete opposite of home, or walking on two feet in one’s own neighbourhood. I don’t really want to leave at all! The spirit of adventure has shrivelled in me, as if I might never return, or this home might not be here waiting when I do.

Later still:

It’s fortunate that moods change. Are not the pictures we paint---and call reality---composed largely of mood, as solid as silk spun from moonbeams?

Slough

I went for the fourth time in a week, on an errand to Slough. It’s a town occupying a special place in the British imagination: perhaps from The Pilgrim’s Progress, which describes the Slough of Despond. “Slough”: a strange English noun, meaning a muddy place: does it rhyme with “cough”, “through”, “though”, or “rough”? With none of these: it rhymes with “now”.

Others will remember that our late Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, dedicated a 1937 poem to Slough. It starts:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

I have always liked the town. I was about to say “despite ...” but there is no need to balance it with negatives. It’s a brash defiant ants’ nest; a town on the plain which expanded quickly, not quite in the overall grid-iron pattern of an American city but more grid-like than most English towns. It has some wide tree-lined avenues with headquarter buildings of glass and steel with names like Federal-Mogul, set behind lawns. It has the Mars factory, manufacturing chocolate bars, owned by the famous American family: you can see it in my photo, along with enough grass to graze several cows. I took it from Kennedy Park. Don’t think of an ornamental area laid out to commemorate the late US President. It’s a few acres for walking dogs and flying kites: hollows and thickets provide opportunities for other activities requiring seclusion. It’s really waste land spared by the developers. The little hill I stood on was probably soil dumped when they excavated the land for a building programme.

Why am I walking around these mundane streets of Slough, so unlike its sister towns just the other side of the river Thames: Eton with its aristocratic College, Windsor with its Royal Castle which has given a surname to the Queen and her direct descendants? I’m walking here because it was here three years ago that I found I could walk again.

I sit here at the very spot, the Sheffield Road Rest Gardens, a little quadrant next to a busy crossroads and rows of shops. It has trees, flowerbeds and benches. I’d like to choose the shadiest bench but it’s occupied. A man sits alone there, quite still. I respect his space. That’s the bench where I sat with K that time, to eat the pizzas we’d bought, after our trip to a nearby village. There I’d consulted a doctor specialising in my condition: one which caused a kind of allergic reaction to the slightest exercise. The flare-up could last days or weeks, so I had to be careful at all times; but on that occasion I insisted we could leave the car and go over to the gardens to eat our pizza. “Are you sure?” asked K. I was. Something had happened in the doctor’s surgery. All he did was tell me the theory and ask some questions. Answering one of those questions, I knew that I became well at that instant. He had asked me about the onset of the illness. It was in 1973. I saw that I had repressed a desire to be free, for an altruistic motive. As talking therapies go, this was like laser surgery done with pinpoint accuracy. I saw the repression, acknowledged it freely, laid my burden on the ground and walked away from it. The doctor had no idea what had happened; didn’t quite believe me when I emailed him the next day to say I was well.

I think this is how the miracles of Jesus worked. A simple encounter and you throw away your crutch. I didn’t have a literal crutch but I donated my wheelchair to charity. I developed more stamina each day, gave thanks for the ability to go and post a letter without fear; to travel to a place without having to park the car close by. Since then the act of walking, healthy like a young man again when I’d been getting ready to die, is a sacred act of thanksgiving.

So here I am, sitting on a nearby bench in the Rest Gardens with my Explorer Map---2½ inches to the mile. I find the spot and mark it with a tiny dot, as if to say “Here was a miracle”. The man on the other bench comes over and asks “Are you trying to find your way?” I tell him briefly why I’m here. He listens intently, but he stands four feet away, as if respectfully. Perhaps he doesn’t want me to smell his worn and grimy clothes. His face is lined and weary but he’s bright enough. He’s a carpenter, but cannot work due to epilepsy. He could fall off a ladder, hurt himself with tools. For the same reason he cannot drive a car. We talk, discussing possibilities. In this of all places, I think, there must be hope. Our encounter must have a meaning. I tell him about my application to work as a handyman for an old people’s charity. Perhaps he could do that? He seems interested. It’s a voluntary scheme, but it could restore a man’s self-respect. I explain that I haven’t started: still waiting for my Criminal Records Board check to be completed. He tells me insistently that he has no criminal record. Poor man! Does he think I suspected otherwise?

I wonder if our encounter could change his luck, could in some way answer his unspoken prayer. But why should I need to know the detail? I know miracles can happen.

Religion in public life

It’s apparent from the Web that in America religion is as much an irritant on the public consciousness as politics. I mean, you get bitten by the media and you can’t help scratching all the time. So the agenda is stolen. I don’t want to react to the state of religion in America or in the media. Religion is not about controversy but something dear to the individual’s heart.

Over here, the media would naturally like to stir up any hornet’s nest they can find; but there isn’t so much mileage in religious issues, which are considered of interest mainly to their own congregations. On the other hand, religion is public property: the Church of England is Established in our (non-existent) constitution, i.e. the Queen is its Head, and so on. When I was researching the office of Mayor for a biography, I was surprised at the number of civic events held in the form of a service at the Parish Church. The Mayor attended all these in a year:

* Scouts Service
* Women’s World Day of Prayer
Salvation Army Toy Service (at Salvation Army Citadel)
* Mendelssohn Hymn of Praise (Choral)
* Royal Air Force Freedom of High Wycombe Service
Annual Convention at Church of God of Prophecy
* Thanksgiving Service Godstowe School
* Wycombe Abbey School Centenary Speech Day service (sermon by Lord Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury)
Remembrance and thanksgiving service, Sue Ryder Hospice (at Nettlebed Parish Church)
Mayors’ Civic Service in Aylesbury
* St Vincent and the Grenadines Association 17th Anniversary church service.
Carol Service at the Swan Theatre
Town mayor's centenary civic service. Also attended by HM Lord Lieutenant for Buckinghamshire, Commander the Lord Cottesloe KstJ, JP, RN (Retd) (at All Saints Parish Church, Marlow)
Chairman's Civic Service (at All Saints Parish Church, Marlow)
A service of thanksgiving and blessing for the opening of Harleyford Golf Club (at the club)
* Battle of Britain Sunday
Licensing of team vicar (at Basilica of St Mary & St George, Sands, High Wycombe)
* For all our babies and children
* Mayor’s Civic service
* Remembrance Day service
Salvation Army Christmas music (at Salvation Army Citadel)

Services marked with asterisk were held at the Parish Church of All Saints, in a town with 15% Muslim population. As far as I am aware, a Muslim mayor would attend the same services. Each mayor by the way is elected for a year. The post is ceremonial, very much like the Queen’s.

My illustration shows the full ceremonial costume at the weighing-in ceremony, a tradition which goes back to the days of Queen Anne. Sebert Graham is the incumbent in the photo (1995), and the subject of the (commissioned) biography. The book is available on Amazon.co.uk, should you be interested. I am not trying to promote it! My point is to show how religion can be treated in a settled population. I don’t mean literally settled. There are many (temporary) immigrants here in the last few years, from Poland & Zimbabwe especially.

In England there are many beautiful churches and cathedrals, going back a thousand years or more in many cases. As someone said the other day, they are an enduring form of prayer in themselves: the buildings, their stained-glass windows, so much devotion carved into their stones. As religion retreats like a millennial tide, these buildings are left on the shores like dinosaurs’ bones, and no one knows what to do with them when the congregations stop coming.

Getting unblocked

I’ve been glad of the chance to edit some of Ghetufool’s work lately. Writing is something I’m driven to by an impulse that won’t be denied. So what to do when writer’s block strikes? Turn to religion, I suppose, as people do when they feel vulnerable and melancholy. A fellow-blogger friend distinguishes the stratagem of “God is love” from the stratagem of “sex, drugs, hobbies, sports, money”. Yes, and if the chance arose today I’d gladly go and earn some money and find a day’s fulfilment there. Failing that, I’m tempted to finish the red wine, just to set my “artistic temperament” a-flowing. Still, I want to tackle religion, that honey-trap for the unwary, that bonfire of the sanities.

Oddly enough, over the last few days, wandering the suburbs under a cloudless sky, stopping to talk to ladies in their eighties tending their front gardens, letting the sweat dry on my cheeks, seeing the last of the cherry-blossom, pink as cotton-candy, fade on the ground under the trees---I have discovered I am on the side of religion: not against it as I carelessly thought.

I have certain religious beliefs of my own. 1) I should not disparage or praise anyone else’s religion. 2) I should not promote my own. 3) I should not disparage others for behaving contrary to my first two beliefs.

I have no other beliefs: not in God, Devil, Saviour, Commandments, Love, Enlightenment, sin, Heaven, any form of afterlife. I don’t disbelieve them either. Apart from the three listed above, I try and avoid beliefs altogether.

What is religion? I think it is the inbuilt urge to sacrifice and renunciation that arises in Nature. The gods must be propitiated. I learnt this long ago from a book, but I understand it now, not as an intellectual rationalization that some anthropologist might have deduced, but from my own case. When I feel life’s emptiness, I instinctively do penance.

Again I ask myself, what is religion? It is to give thanks and to beg for help. This is prayer. I don’t need any deity to whom to address my prayers. I find that within this human body the urge to pray comes naturally, without need for any particular theology.

What is my own religion? To get my bicycle wheels out of the tramlines. To untangle myself from other people’s reality, and face my own. My method is to immerse myself in nature: my common and individual human nature, as well as the ambient world as I find it. To untangle, I may argue against all ideas, all intellectual stuff: my own as much as everyone else’s. In my hierarchy of human wisdom, intellect is merely a tool, a servant: not a leader, prime mover, nor a generator of ideas.

The sweat dries unwiped on my cheeks. I pass a house I nearly bought last summer, with a beautiful view of the town. An old lady is tending her garden nearby and we have one of those conversations in which strangers compare their life-histories. I tell her I am from the valley below, from a little street cramped amongst old factories. She says she understands why I come up to the open view of the hills. I feel like Zarathustra, or Gibran’s Prophet. She is in no hurry to end our chat, but something persuades me to move on. I lie in a grassy meadow for a while, but the restless urge moves me on. (There's a similar encounter the following day: a wonderful conversation with a woman in her late eighties, only three teeth left. Her husband comes over to join in and we discuss the state of the world, and agree on everything.)

This cloudless day! When I feel oppressed, I think of those who are more oppressed, and send out my thoughts to them like a swarm of bees to settle in their village and produce them some honey. This too is part of my religion.

If you can enter the realm of nature, you can escape the tramlines of everyday consciousness. My meditation isn’t to sit cross-legged concentrating on the breath in its journey through nasal passages and lungs. There are dangers in that. I did it for more years than I want to mention, emerging still sane---if I have the right to judge on my own case. The meditation was embedded in a religion whose basic tenets were (1) the superior enlightenment of its disciples compared with the rest of humanity, and (2) the hopelessly inferior enlightenment of the disciples compared to the teacher. Do you understand how potentially harmful that is? My teacher did not in fact teach. He was a revered figurehead who spouted generalities. I am lucky to escape unscathed, reflecting with Nietzsche that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. If he had actually taught, it might have been worse. Not that I blame him. He didn’t insist on me being a disciple. Why did I enslave myself like that? Same reason as the other disciples, I suppose. We were brothers and sisters, greeting each other in the Hindi equivalent of “hail truth, consciousness and bliss”. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was easier to fall down into the trap than get out.

Nature is my religion now. In my body, my senses, the world around, my embracing of my home town, my beloved, my home. Oh, from all my years in a Buddhist-Hindu kind of thinking, I know that attachment to these things brings suffering. All can be taken away. I will die. But, I was taught, this human body is a most precious thing. All jivas beg for a human body. Man is the crown of creation. Yes, you might be born as a pariah dog. Or an intestinal worm. I don’t care. I embrace it all: the suffering and the joy. I might as well enjoy it whilst I am here. (This is not a sermon: you must do what you think right, not anything I might say.)

Why did I get caught up in all that Oriental religion? I think I was inoculated against Christianity at an early age, though at times I had to attend church twice on Sundays. Had I come across the right role-model, Christianity might have captivated me. The nearest I got to that was reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, aged 16. All my researches into Christianity have been secret. There must be a reason for that. I hated John Bunyan at first, coming across this hymn when I was 7:

Who would true valour see
Let him come hither
Here’s one will valiant be
Come wind come weather
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.

I didn’t like the tune, I didn’t like the word pilgrim, not knowing what it meant: it sounded grey and grim. I love it all now.

As I dictate these words into my recorder, the sun beats down from a cloudless sky. I had thought to sit on a bench in the back garden with a cold beer, but something in me rejected it indignantly. Of my own accord I wanted what in my inward thoughts I carelessly label “a penance”: “A pilgrimage” would be more exact. I see myself as a monk, striding among the Chiltern Hills, actually the suburbs of this town. I discovered The Pilgrim’s Progress on a day like this. I was not solitary by choice then, just lonely, staying at my grandmother’s house. I had also been reading a book by Madame David-Néel about Tibet, in which, dressed as a beggar woman, she had witnessed a lung-gom-pa, one of those “legendary lamas who by means of psychic training could rush nonstop across vast distances of rugged landscape, running without end.”

“By that time he had nearly reached up; I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum. He wore the usual monastic robe and toga, both rather ragged. His left hand gripped a fold of the toga and was half hidden under the cloth. The right held a phurba (magic dagger). His right arm moved slightly at each step as if leaning on a stick, just as though the phurba, whose pointed extremity was far above the ground, had touched it and were actually a support. My servants dismounted and bowed their heads to the ground as the lama passed before us, but he went his way apparently unaware of our presence.” (Excerpted from this site.)

I mention it only because I twice at that age accomplished similar feats, quite spontaneously.

So my true religion, now, at my time of life, is that of William Blake, as in his Proverbs of Heaven and Hell: not to renounce desires but to discover them, trust them, obey them. I don't see a separation between body and soul. That is not a belief, but a fact, a perception.

This is already too long. It's crude, thrown together. But my writer’s block is broken for now. Enough.

Free as a bird

Preface
Ghetufool has given me permission to publish his short story here. His pen-name indicates modesty but not in the way you may think: “ghetu phool” is the Bengali for calotropis gigantea, a wayside wildflower. We have collaborated for a year or so (he writes, I edit). You may have seen a brief quote from this story in my previous piece Cherry Tree. Here is the entire story.

He watched the little house-sparrow as it continued crashing against the glass, hopelessly exhausting its energy.

The little life could see the whole world outside. It could see its clan but could not reach them. An invisible monster always put its hand in the way, just for fun.

In panic, the bird was fluttering its wings against the glass, to get past that cruel hand. With no success so far.

He had joined this organisation about a year ago. It was a double promotion with a 100 per cent salary hike: a flattering offer, but he was confident in his ability. How could he have refused?

His last job had been a pain. He never learned to get on with his boss, who reminded him of a pig farmer and abused him continually---routinely belittled him in front of others, using powerful lungs so that people several floors down could hear. Going down in the lift was embarrassing after those episodes.

This new office was a complete contrast. Bosses left him alone. Whatever needed to be said came via emails. Nothing but occasional murmurs disturbed the concentrated hush. What could be more civilised?

In every way it was a double promotion. His job title, salary, responsibilities, prestige were double what he was used to. Abuse was a thing of the past. The work hours were civilised too. You were never forced to work till all hours. You were free to leave when the clock struck five. Provided of course that you met the deadline.

He never actually left at five. Midnight was more likely. You had to take deadlines seriously, to make sure there would be a job to come back to the next day. There were no actual threats, but he didn’t want to risk losing all this.

The bird was losing its strength, fluttering its wings less now, in a kind of resignation. It was waiting for the inevitable, whatever that might be; which it---inevitably---could not imagine.

It rested on the chair. The door was shut, the window seemed the only escape route. An invisible pane prevented it from passing through. How could it have got into the office? Oh, it must have slipped in through that gap. It must have forgotten that.

Just to make sure, he plugged the gap with papers. He could not have explained why. The bird fluttered again: his getting up from his chair to walk across the room seemed to provoke it into frenzied action. Perhaps it thought he was about to claim its life.

He sank back into his chair and lit a cigarette. Soon the room would be filled with smoke and the bird would panic more: unless it were drugged by the nicotine into quiescence. It would be fascinating to wait and watch.

His boss had sent the whole office an email singing his praise, letting everyone know he’d been singled out for congratulation. It was phrased in perfect polished English, with every word and punctuation mark carefully weighed and executed: a crisp business email copied to the entire office. Co-workers came to congratulate him for working day and night to land this major project for the company.

Then he had to deliver an impromptu speech. He started with thanking his team: they roared back their appreciation. He heaped praise on the company and its work culture, promising more such projects to come. The ovation seemed endless. The whole world was excited. So why did he feel uneasy?

On his way to the cafeteria, fragments of conversation had floated his way. His colleagues stopped when they saw him coming, greeted him with that professional smile that comes so easy to tie-wearing executives, smooth like their emails. But he had heard them cursing him in filthy language, and he wondered why.

He didn’t expect things to move so fast. His entire team got a fat bonus. And the target for next time was raised almost double. An email lightly indicated that next month’s bonus would also be double if this new deadline were met. The ‘if’ was there just for the sake of proper English grammar; just to clear away the green underline of Microsoft’s grammar-checker.

He lost no time in handing out responsibilities. There was no time to lose. Past achievement counted for nothing. There was no time to relax. If this project were not met ... the company would sink. That’s more or less what he told them, in an email of course. The tone was always the same. Each new deadline had to be met, as a condition of the company staying in business. They’d achieve it with heroic effort, only to be rewarded with a bigger project and prophecies of doom from his top bosses if it wasn’t completed on target. The only time the company wasn’t in crisis was in the middle of a project.

Next day two resignation letters were handed in. Two more the following day: all junior level executives with 1-4 years of experience. They hopped jobs at will and you could do nothing to stop them. As a precaution, he doubled the salary of his remaining staff, earning their cheers. Many came to his cubicle and thanked him personally.

The following day there were two more resignations: with now only five days left till the deadline.

He hadn’t slept properly for months. That must explain his tiredness. He eyed the bird and puffed his cigarette. It had given up its struggle and just looked intently through the window, where a flock of sparrows twittered in the darkened sky. This district was virtually treeless, as if nature were a just a memory. But there was still romance. It was the sparrows’ mating season.

Do birds feel regret, sadness?

He sank low in his rocking chair, a fine piece that he’d bought on a business trip to the US. He glanced at his wristwatch – a fine Swiss one. His first watch had been locally made, a present from his father during his class ten board exams. He used to wear it all night, and rub it clean with a soft cloth. The glass had stayed unscratched. It was such a prized possession that his sister had never dared touch it. It was cheaply made by a state-owned company, but hadn’t let him down in fifteen years. Where was it now? On the move to his new flat, he’d given it to one of the packers, who had received it eagerly, with profuse thanks. Thus he had lightly abandoned his last link to the old frugal life. The watch he wore now came from his European bosses as reward for landing a big project. It cost about five thousand dollars: heavy, not comfortable to wear. Yet still he handled it carefully, like a piece of jewellery, not just something to tell the time. Oh shit! 10.30pm. It was getting late. He must have been sitting idle watching the bird for three hours. God! Three hours wasted: the deadline approaching like an express train, with him mesmerized on the tracks.

“Hey birdie, would you talk to me?”
“Free me.”
“Who am I to free you?”
“I cannot lift the window glass, do it for me and I shall be free.”
“What if I want to keep you here forever, in this room? I would look after you, feed you, give you anything you want. Let me know you accept. Isn’t this better than freedom? It will save you wasting your day on scavenging: a few crumbs here, a couple of seeds there, an insect so hard to catch.”
“But why do you want to keep me in bondage?”
“Yes. That is the question. You have understood. Why?”
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
“Free me.”
“No. You have entered my den. I don’t let anyone go. You can live with me or perish.”

He started laughing. The invisible monster, that glass that frustrated the bird so, seemed to act on his own body, shaking him with violence. He could no longer speak normal words. The laughter constricted his voice, started to choke him. He fixed his eye on the bird. It had been still for some time, eyeing him back. Now, as his laughter ceased ominously, it started fluttering again, crashing against the invisible glass.