My window to the world

Seven in the morning is a busy hour for Nargis and Gulbadan. They meet under a flowering amaltas tree before issuing persistent and piercing wake-up calls to the sleepy neighbourhood around them. Nargis, the more active of the two, walks further from the tree to ensure even sound distribution. Gulbadan stands her ground and rotates her slim neck like the possessed little girl in The Exorcist . About an hour later, Prince Shahryar emerges from the ruins of a 14th-century monument. Resplendent in shades of blue and green, he approaches the alarm-raisers with caution. The chorus gets louder as the adult peacock joins his peafowl paramours.

I don’t like mornings, people and morning people. But Nargis, Gulbadan and Shahryar are non-humans, therefore exceptions. And these days — given the domestic turn life has taken since the lockdown — the trio adds meaning to the activity that WH Davies had devoted a poem ( Leisure , 1911) to: ‘Stand and stare’.

Until March 24, the sliver of a window in my kitchen, which overlooks a park in the heart of South Delhi, was merely a structural element to my tired eyes. The vision altered with the prime minister’s announcement of a 21-day lockdown. The radius of my world rapidly shrunk to the rooms I occupy and the staircase that connects the two. And the window elevated itself to the status of a lifesaver.

The peafowls and the peacock — named after characters in Pakistani serials I binge on — are in the august company of warblers, flycatchers, jungle babblers and squirrels. The appearance of the odd ginger cat sends the smaller birds into a tizzy, but things settle down with the timely intervention of the national bird.

Stationed by the window, while I dice potatoes or whisk eggs in a bowl, my vision extends to another side of the park — where a young girl helps a toddler walk in a balcony. The toddler’s head bobs up and down the horizon while his companion stands out in her bright clothes. With undying enthusiasm, the duo goes over and over again the same drill until lunchtime every day. Their routine, in the backdrop of the standstill, adds an element of certainty to my life in quarantine.

In the same way, newlywed Aparna (Sharmila Tagore), in Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar , sits by a window as she negotiates a life without the material comforts of her maternal home in a village in Bengal. Her first glimpse of her husband’s cramped one-room accommodation in Kolkata brings tears to her kohl-rimmed eyes. But she gets a grip on her emotions when her eyes fall on a smiling mother and her child in the backyard — through the lens of a torn window curtain. Months later, Aparna replaces the torn curtain with a pretty one with little flowers, and her despair with newfound confidence and happiness.

The window — in this case, louvred — also plays a fairly important role in housewife Charulata’s life. Also from a Ray film, based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, the young and educated protagonist seeks an escape from her daily life — occasionally with the help of a pair of opera glasses — through the windows that line the spacious corridors of her opulent Kolkata house. Vendors, street performers and portly office-goers keep her busy while her husband, editor of a nationalist newspaper in pre-Independence India, writes columns against the British. Charulata’s escape route from her daily life, however, has a set pattern, thus underscoring the space and comfort that routine brings to our lives.

A break from routine, as most travel magazines would have us believe, is always welcome. Especially when you have the means to travel. The implications can be different if a break in routine plants you firmly within the confines of a house, more specifically by a window that makes you witness a series of murders. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window is the story of a photographer who spies on neighbours as he nurses a broken leg.

In the dark of the night, as I stand by the same kitchen window with gin and tonic, I observe the tall brick monument in the park with a different set of eyes. Sans peacocks and squirrels, it looks like the brooding messenger of another era, when thieves and bandits were executed in public view. I sniff hard for a whiff of mystery, in vain — my neighbourhood looks decidedly uneventful. What I find instead is a heady fragrance of spring, carried to my eager nostrils by a playful night breeze. As if on cue, a painting comes alive before my eyes — of a window that opens to the colourful life in a Mediterranean village. Painter Henri Matisse’s Open Window (1905) is a medley of pinks and mauves, dotted with periwinkles and sailboats. It is also a capsule of positive emotions that transports you away from a place of despondency.

Using an imaginary paintbrush, I plant Nargis, Gulbadan and Shahryar on Matisse’s canvas. I think they fit in beautifully — just as they do in my window to the world.