Bird Hospital
New Delhi, India
July 2004
I am in New Delhi with the sole intention of seeing the beautiful,
beautiful Taj Maha. That is my #1 goal. After that, I want to suck in as much of
India as I can. I want to see the
sights, the sounds, and the smells that are so uniquely India. But I am finding
this hard to do on this trip. I have a guide and a driver and they are doing
everything their could to keep me from people. My trip, so far, has been too sanitary
for my taste.
Everywhere we go, they are two steps ahead on either side of
me, pushing people out of my way. They
clap at others and announce, “Get out of the way, Madam is coming through”.
Their efforts, though appreciated, embarrass me. The crowd parts the seas for me as I am
escorted in front of every line and I am treated and received as if this was my
birthright. No one but me objects to this undeserved treatment.
When I finish exploring some ancient monument I am escorted
to my waiting car with the air conditioning running at such full blast that I
need a sweater.
One time, I am taking candid photos of the people. My guide
watches and waits patiently for me. And when I am ready to go, he announces
that he had secured the cooperation of a modern, young Indian couple who had
agreed to pose for me.
“Madame, I see that you like to take photos of people. So
this family will pose for you. They have agreed,” he tells me proudly.
There, in the heat of the afternoon, stand a husband and
wife with their two children. They are ready and willing to strike any pose I ask
of them. It is hard to explain to the guide that I don’t take posed
photos. But he is so proud of himself.
So I just take a few photos, thank them and we all go on our way.
One day, I have the afternoon to myself. I plan on doing
some exploring. I wander the streets and
am bombarded by kids and beggars and vendors and taxi drivers. They pull on me
and call to me and beg and beg and beg with a desperation that is hard to take.
Once they realize that they were not going to make any money off of me, they
back off and look for their next victim.
I go back to my hotel to seek a little bit of refuge and to
adjust my exploration plan. I ask the concierge at the hotel what was the going
price to pay for a tut-tut driver. The concierge had a striking resemblance to
Sadam Hussein and which distracted me as I speak with him.
“Madame”, he tells me, “do not go with any of those people,
they are dirt and they will cheat you. Take a taxi. It is more expensive but you
will be safer” he says in a voice filled with a distain.
I thank him, leave and wander outside to a pack of tut-tut
drivers. They began to scramble as I approach them.
“Madame, where do you wan to go?”
“Madame come with me, come this way.” Another attempts to
usher me to his vehicle.
“Madame, I will take special care of you”, says a third
driver.
“How much do you charge?” I ask one of them.
“Whatever you want to pay, madam”, he politely responds. I hate this response because I didn’t know what is a fair price.
“The concierge told me not to go with you”, I tell him in
hopes of conveying that I have some semblance of street smarts, no matter how limited
these street smarts actually are.
“That is because he has his hands in the pocket of the taxi
drivers. He is not to be trusted”, the man tell me. “He is only looking out for
himself.”
“200 rupees”, I throw out, “200 rupees for two hours “. The price is so low, I am a little
embarrassed. But I have start somewhere.
“So be it Madame, this way”, he says without an argument and
even with a hint of glee and I couldn’t believe this price is acceptable. So
off we go to his old, beat-up, tin tut-tut.
“Where to, Madam?” he asks politely.
“I want you to take me some place unusual. You decide. Take
me some place that my guide would never take me.”
“OK, Madame. I know just the place. We will go to the Bird Hospital”, he says, pleased with his idea.
And off we go down the long, narrow, congested streets of New
Delhi. We dodge cars and bikes and kids and cows. Driving in New Delhi is just
one continuous game of chicken in the road. Every intersection is a challenge
and a confrontation. And it doesn’t matter if the challenge is brought on by a
huge deliver truck or a donkey or a camel or a kid. The winner is not the largest or the fastest
but the one who doesn’t flinch. We flinch a lot. I don’t think he flinches because he is afraid. I think he
flinches because I over-react to every near miss we encounter.
We arrive at the Bird Hospital, which is run by the
Jains, an extreme group of Buddhist who believe all life is precious. I mention
this because I thought we were going to a hospital named after a man named
BIRD. But we are going to a hospital that specializes in the treatment of wild
birds. In particular, they specialize in the treatment of pigeons and other
small, urban birds.
As I enter the front door, I remove my shoes, as is Buddhist
tradition when you enter someone’s house. I hear loud chirping. The smells is
offensive, particularly in this heat I
can almost taste the smell, it is so pungent.
There are hundreds of birdcages, stacked on top of each
other and most of them are filled with filthy pigeons that have been sewn back together
again. I can’t believe it. Who cares
about pigeons?
Then I notice a public service poster addressing ways to
minimize head injuries to pigeons. The poster encourages the general public to
encase their ceiling fans so that when pigeons fly into their homes, ceiling
fans doesn’t maim the birds.
I have to think for just a moment. It never occurred to me
that there are people in this world who may have pigeons fly into their homes
and their ceiling fans and nearly decapitate themselves and then these people
pick up these gross, bloody, near-death birds and rush them off to the Bird
Hospital.
And this happens so often that there are hospital officials
who think it is necessary to educate people on how to minimize the potential to
decapitate pigeons in the home. I don’t
know anyone who ever had a pigeon in his home. This just isn’t my world. It’s not
in my thinking. I come from a world that kills pigeons because they are filthy
and a public nuisance. To the best of my knowledge, they carry diseases.They
can make people sick and they are a menace. They can fly into you and get tangles up in your hair and cause all kinds of havoc. Now I am standing in a hospital,
funded completely by donations that specialize in the rehabilitation of
pigeons.
I stand there, in the midst of this realization, and wonder
about the meaning of life for all of us: birds, mammals, fish, and plants. I
probably could spend days, even years, on this thought. But my pandering is
interrupted when I glance down and notice a wet, filthy floor and realize that
I am barefoot and walking in bird shit, lots of bird shit. I am repulsed. My momentary regard for all life is immediate
eradicated from all of my thoughts and morality. I revert right back to my
original thinking: all pigeons are filthy, dirty, disgusting birds. And I am
not vested in their well-being.
As I roam from room to room to room, my presence reaches the
attention of the head surgeon. Word is out that an American is in the
building. The surgeon comes looking for
me. He wants to engage in a discussion on the current care for pigeons and
other wild birds in America. He wants to know how his hospital compares to bird
hospitals in the United States. As I cannot believe his question, he cannot
believe that we do not have any hospitals that specialize in pigeon care.
“Who takes care of your injured pigeons then?” he wanted to
know.
“I don’t know. No one. We just let them die or we kill them,”
I respond, now a bit defensively.
“You kill them???? Why????? I denote an incredulous tone on
his part.
“We don’t like pigeons in my country”, I say sheepishly,
feeling a bit shallow.
“Why?” He truly doesn’t understand.
“I don’t know why, we just don’t”, I say hoping this louder
tone of mine will stop his line of stupid questioning. And that is the truth. Then I realize we don’t
like a lot of animals in our country. We kill bugs and squirrels and bats and
stray dogs and cats and birds and snake and raccoons and possums. And then I realize that we treat animals just
like our foreign policy. We take first strike and then talk ourselves in to
believing that it is for the good of the rest of the world. We quickly
eliminate anything that we perceive could possibly harm us.
As this realization seeps in to my thinking, I am standing
in front of a man who has spent his entire professional career on doing
everything he can to preserve the sanctity of life for pigeons and sparrow and crows.
What a world we live in. And I know this man is right and I am wrong. Every
life is scared. But I can’t bring myself to step into his realm of action. This
is no part of me that would do anything to preserve the well being of a pigeon.
I stand there with respect for this man. But I don’t want to
be like him, not even a little bit. I don’t ever want to save a pigeon. I don’t ever want to see a pigeon that has
been hit by a ceiling fan. That’s gross.
Epilogue
Since I have returned from India, I have stopped killing bugs.
Most times, when I am in the company of other Americans, I am ridiculed for my
efforts to save a bug. I am treated as if my actions are somewhat
irresponsible. By not killing that particular bug, I am single handedly
perpetuating the proliferation of infectious bugs, so now I tell people, “I can’t
kill that spider. I am too Buddhist for
that”. Not everyone understands me. But
it does shut them up. And maybe I do want to be like the surgeon, just a little
bit.
