Disoriented

It was as dull as ditch water that day. It was overcast and the heavens were covered with so much cloud and mist that prayers were not reaching it. I was in London walking down Coldhabour Lane, when a dove flew straight past me. But, it soon turned back. I could hear it labour against the heavy air. Now it flew in the opposite direction, and then swerved again! This strange activity had now captured my complete attention. I walked at a slow pace about to cross the road ahead when I observed the bird, coming towards me. It looked to its left, then took a right turn, almost as if it was driving a car and wanted to check for any oncoming traffic from the other direction. It was one disoriented dove. I felt a bit disoriented myself as I tried to figure out the reason behind the bird’s flight patterns. For a moment it felt like a scene from a cheap sci-fi flick, where the dove was actually a robot drone sent to spy on us.

My train of thought was broken soon as the dove made another U-turn, then finally swooped past me into the heavy London mist.

This incident made me think, like a lighted match was thrown in a dry forest, and I immediately asked myself, why a dove? I have seen a disoriented pigeon which I almost managed to kill with my bike. It would have been dramatic though if I had pulled it off, and I would have been really angry because my bike was only a few days old then. The pigeon was trying to cross the road. It had absolutely no respect for rules and especially for the right of way. Over and above that, it started to take flight, and by the time it was midway across, I could almost reach it by hand and could have swatted it like a fly. I pulled hard at my brakes, and my rear wheel lifted off as I almost hit a pregnant lady pushing a pram!

Now, that I felt was a disoriented bird. But it was a pigeon, and pigeons are always disoriented, and many a bard has crooned about its callousness and the desire to get rid of them. Take this for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY.

And humans? Humans are only second in line to pigeons on the disorientation scale. Humans are simply clueless about their lives. I get the impression that life is like a big half-baked cake, so big that we don’t have enough cream to cover it, so we choose to cover it with paint and perfume and create an illusion of deliciousness and hope that nobody will want to eat it. And we love to live in this deception, because even if we have great visual acuity, we have little foresight.

We believe that all things must come to an end, tearing down everything with bulldozers and destroying the planet, yet we writhe in fear at the thought of our own destruction which will befall us eventually. We wish to think about greenhouse gases and food shortage, because when there is a forest we need the wood and when there is a hole in the ozone layer we need the forest. Because when there is war we want peace, and we want to attain peace by waging a war. Then we create villains so that we can praise the hero. Because, when we are children we wish to be grown-ups and when we are adults we wish to be children again. And when there is all this truth pulling down the veil of deception from all around us, we start wishing bliss in ignorance and remind ourselves to use our freedom of speech judiciously.

I find it especially disorienting to sit in a train, often wishing I had a veil over my eyes. Occasionally my eyes wander about, and I am transfixed at the human condition. It isn’t easy to close your eyes and drift off in a well-lit surrounding because the light is too bright to close your eyes and drift off into a pleasant day dream. Passengers sitting in a train with nothing to do often look at what other passengers are doing. And not as if they are doing it because they want to. Their eyes just move around like a floating kite guided by a tumultuous atmosphere. But then they suddenly realise that, and return to a meaningless semi-erect position pretending to look blankly in front, as if someone had scolded them for looking. Inside, they might be feeling extremely disoriented, not being able to explain their unconscious curiosity to know what people in their personal space are up to, because personal space cannot be measured by the number of gadgets competing for attention, but by the physical space between people. And I find myself baffled, making a long journey in a brightly lit train, because if personal space is to be raped anyway, why not keep at least a free newspaper to look at, and spare fellow passengers of weird lost glances.

As for me, I spare my fellow passengers of weird glances by keeping the fire of my (dry) mental forest alive, and writing a disorienting piece like this, hoping that this kind of behaviour can be explained somehow, and rationalised. Besides, now in reflection, I feel it might have been a seagull and not a dove that I saw over Coldhabour Lane.