Panchhi.
[Birds.]
By Sanjot Singh Bains
When we were kids, my neighbor and I would meet outside, in the street between our homes, to go shoot at the passing birds with our plastic-pelleted BB guns. There were always birds lining the rooftops, speaking in the trees, nesting in the eaves and under the porch, decorating it with their droppings. In the early summer when we were let out of school, we’d celebrate our newfound freedom with all sorts of games, ones learned at school and novel ones designed from sticks and stones, trees and boulders.
We’d play from the late afternoon, after sleeping through the morning, until the mosquitos came out biting. And when the shadows got longer and the clouds glowed pink and orange, we’d lay in the warm evening grass, squinting at the sunset and watch the birds embroider the pastel felted skies with their dark dotted chevrons, a heavenly quilt.
We were fast friends, Roy and me. Roy was born exactly one day after me, at the same hospital. His parents were immigrants too, drawn to our dusty town by all the other immigrants. We both had doting mothers and stern fathers. We were not much alike otherwise, but children don’t care about that kind of thing, and there weren’t many other options in our geriatric neighborhood.
It was a fairly well-to-do place, a heterogeneous mix of white retirees and a burgeoning brown middle class. In those days, a blue-collar man could stretch his arms out to America and feel her open hand. And if he was spurned, my father never let me know it. He was a frugal man, but never cheap. He was stern with his family and jovial with his friends, smart but not always reasonable. My father went to battle with the birds often, installing spikes, clapping his shoes at them to set 'em aflight. It was perhaps an exercise in vanity, or maybe he was trying to wrest some control over his domain from nature. Whatever it was, it was in vain. The birds were unrelenting in their defecation; they soiled his sidewalks and his pride. So when he saw Roy and me in the street taking potshots at the grackles, my father encouraged us. My mother always thought it horrible — she was a pacifist, a vegetarian never short on empathy — but boys at that age hardly care what their mothers think.
We enlisted in the Fowl War. My father provided us with bottles of bright green BB pellets and sent us off to battle with a wave. We would trudge off with our packs to the nearby field, where we’d bunker down, and await our enemy. The bird army assembled in its ranks on the power lines, black feathers glistening blue in the sun. We readied our weapons. We certainly fancied ourselves soldiers, taking careful aim, shooting to kill. We never thought we’d actually hit any. It was all a game, after all. The birds flew far too high and swiftly for our untrained shots and meager weapons. They were just convenient targets for our masculine fantasies.
Having laid waste to our stores of munitions, we’d head back home.
“I’d have gotten one, but for the wind!”
“I was closer than you anyway.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll get ‘em.”
Like this, we passed many summer days, interleaved with all the other games. And when our idlings called us back to service, we’d go back to the front with smiles on our faces and bravados soaring.
One day—
not quite any different from the others—
I hit one.
It squawked and tumbled down in seeming slow motion, a dull thud where it fell and the flutter of feathers as it struggled.
I ran away. My heart sank in my chest and my hands turned to ice. Tears welled, vision blurred, I ran.
I ran all the way home and tried to shove away any thoughts of what I’d done. I let my mother chide me, then console me. I washed up, had dinner, and went to bed.
My mother was never one for lullabies; she would tell us stories — stories of the cowardly fox, the loyal dog, the industrious sparrow, and the clever crow. All stories passed from mothers to children, in so many tumbles of time, never told quite the same way, nor ever losing their shape. They shaped untold generations into mothers and fathers.
At ten years old, I was too old for her stories. I lay awake for a while trying to think of one of my own, but exhaustion bested reflection. Tired men rarely make good philosophers.
An unremarkable night passed. Another sun arose. Its late morning light shone at a slant through my window. The mourning doves and songbirds were drowned out by the squawks of the crows and jays. A light sweat glistened on my brow when I awoke.
That day, alone, I went back to where that bird had fallen. There was no sign of the previous day’s horrors. The breeze had carried away any delicate down. The grass waved gently, unbroken. Already, my memory of it was fading.
We never played that game again that summer, and as the years drew on, all our games ceased. We saw each other less and less as we got older. We went to the same high school. We’d pass one another in the halls and wave or nod. The years passed. The wind took us different ways. I flew south.
A raptor, I flew alone, swift.
Here, along the seaside, the birds are different, they have different stories. I sat along the bluffs and listened to their songs. My mother came to mind; she loved to sit in the midafternoon sun and watch the sparrows flit about in the shaded bushes along the fence line. I thought about the bird. I couldn’t remember much about it. It might have been a grackle. What did it matter, it was gone now. Gone too was the soldier. I walked away from the bluffs a dove.
In the summer between school years, I go north to visit my parents. I see Roy again. We stand in the street between our parents’ houses and exchange pleasantries, catch up. He works in a hospital now. I tell him I’m almost done with school. We talk about the cost of houses, how we couldn’t afford the neighborhood our fathers got into.
I ask about his mother’s salon and his father’s knees.
She doesn’t do anyone’s hair but her own now, and he’s still walking.
He asks about my father’s back and my mother’s sewing.
He doesn’t complain too much, she can’t see the thread anymore.
Sanjot Singh Bains is a fourth-year Electrical Engineering major at UC Santa Barbara.
We sit on the porch and talk about the games we used to play, trying to remember the names we came up with for our fantasies. I tell him my stories—stories of the thieving raccoons, the ochre monarchs, the resourceful gulls, and the reclusive pelicans.
We sit in the silence for a bit, watching the sun set over the waving grass in the field down the way. The orange and pink light sets it ablaze with a cleansing fire. The roaring silence is broken by the lone croak of a jay or a crow— a flutter as it takes off from the power line for God-knows-where.
My brow furrows.
I say to him, “There used to be more birds on this street, huh?”
He shrugs. “Fucking climate change.”
The sky is dark wool, heathered with stars. We return to our homes.