Of a girl and a bird…

The girl.
If one were to capture a panoramic view from where she stood and saw the birds go about in their daily chores, three-fourths of the captured image would be filled up with tall multi-storeyed buildings, full of people, working inside them. The remaining quarter would show something that now resembles a hill. Atop this hill, especially at the hours she spent looking towards it, there are people, busy taking care of the garbage that the city produces, dumping it on the hill, and then using the bulldozer to flatten the area by laying the soil over it. And then this would be repeated daily like an automated piece of code. Reassuring that anything related to man — as trivial as the waste — ultimately goes to the soil, and is rendered inseparable from his fellow humans. It seemed so contrasting, their working conditions — hers and the people working at some distance.
She’d stand by the window pane for sometime daily looking into the distance, trying to identify someone from the previous day, but from a distance, it is really hard to figure out anything clearly. And this vagueness, and her inability to identify people from yesterday or the day before it, though these people were strangers, made her question her own ability in certain ways.
The bird.
From where it saw, and if one took a mere picture of the view it saw daily, one could see at least five dozens of ‘resources’ with their noses buried into the computers, some busy coding, and others supporting the mess that some code produced every now and then. It’d come daily to witness this jamboree of people. Flying all the way from its home, it’d rest atop the slab by the window-pane and then peep into a hall full of IT professionals. Sitting there, its head tilted at just the right angle making its beak more prominent than ever, it bore a semblance of a manager overlooking the entire project. Perhaps even judging them, but for her, it always looked as if it was pitying her and all the others she worked along with. And so whenever they came face to face, separated by the pane, and she looked into its eyes, and on rarer occasions when she managed to get its stare back, she always ended up feeling sad for herself. Between a human and a bird, the freedom, in ways more than one, always eludes humans.
Two worlds separated by a window.
And now, when she stands and looks into the distant hills, she seldom feels sorry for the people working on the hill. She just kept standing there, throwing occasional glances on the hill and then on some distant tree. But above all, she keeps waiting for the bird to come and accompany her. Two facades of a window pane offered so much and so different to the two parties, and the bird was never hopeless in her or any of those who worked with her, around her. Then why should she be? In herself or in anyone who worked on the hill. The bird was the hope from the freer side of the window. And, she’d resume her work after this brief hiatus.
The image has been downloaded from a photo blog without any prior consent. In return, the blog has been written in the third person, with the photoblogger being the protagonist.
Web link that’d take you straight to the aforementioned photo Blog
Originally published at akarshjain.wordpress.com on September 8, 2018.
