The Song of the Lapwing

The twittering of the lapwing first caught my attention in the uncanniest of places. I had definitely heard its twittering before, but at places where one would quite naturally expect to hear such melodies. At that particular moment, however, on that brooding evening inside a meeting room, when I heard this bird sing, I suddenly began to perceive a certain correlation that the song had with something in my life. Something that I could not instantly put a finger on. It felt as if this melody was not just a common birdsong, which usually played out as the sun completed its task for the day and made way for night. It fel more like a clarion call of some sort. As if it were a reminder that there was something else that had to be done, to be accomplished. It was like Pavlov's theory of conditioning; after repetitions of an exercise of ringing a bell and feeding a dog after each ring, when the bell rang again, the dog would begin to salivate thinking food was on its way.

Then, I was working for a mid-sized, over-ambitious e-learning organization. I was seated in a meeting room by the glass window that overlooked the Western Express highway. I had been sitting there for quite sometime that evening, in silence, with the muffled drone of the air-conditioner and the constant grumble of highway traffic, which adamantly percolated through the tightly shut glass panes and concrete walls. Outside, across the highway, sprawled a patch of green foliage that had managed to trick a flock of birds into believing that this was a forested haven in the concrete jungle. While the sounds of air draft and highway-traffic filled up the silence of the meeting room, and as the anxiety and stuffiness of the room began to smother, the song of the lapwing wafted into my ears and lodged itself in my head.

Didhedoit?
Didhedoit?

That was what it seemed to ask: Did he do it? That is what it always sounds like, the constant grumble of an old friend who always manages to keep me company whenever I, or my mind, travel. Then, I began recollecting the numerous places, and in some cases numerous times,  that I had heard the lapwing's song. Kanha's meadows. Fields and noontime beaches in Goa. The paddy fields in front of our ancestral home in Kerala. Outside decrepit railway stations and at interstate trains' signal halts in the hinterland. The vast open mangroves behind my housing colony in remotest Virar, where the last local train went to roost every night, before it set out to do its duties once again early next morning. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, in a spaced-out state of mind, I made the correlation between the song of the lapwing and the need to travel. Physical or metaphorical, whatever the trip was, the lapwing's song became a reminder, an alarm call, that it was time for me to travel.

Then, in that meeting room, this song was a welcome respite from the thick fog of silence that smothered the room. The people all around me, team mates on a certain project, sat without uttering a word. Feet shuffled. Chairs screeched, making nervous eyes and heads swivel in the direction of the culprit. Once the silent admonishment was administered, all eyes flitted back towards the project manager, who sat perched on the back of his chair, his head hanging down as if he had kettle bells dangling from his nose. Opposite him, across the oval table around which we, the lesser mortals called content writers, huddled, sat his minion, a senior instructional designer, with her head also hanging down, index fingers of both hands twirling around the edge of her dupatta. She was more like a personal assistant and accomplice to the project manager, and both of them equally obnoxious, overwhelmingly boring, and completely clueless about how to conduct a simple, daily status meeting.

Nerves were on edge. I even noticed goosebumps on the hands of a senior writer. The suspense in that meeting room, concerning a certain announcement that the project manager should have made 2 hours ago, bogged down the already weary team of writers. The sense of uncertainty was murderous. A gloomy future, like the exploding dusk outside, was what the team's future looked like. Or was made out to be. Every evening.

Probably in my mind alone, there were only two things playing: the local-train time-table, where as the stifling minutes passed by, I lamented the departure of each train; 6.17 pm...gone; 6.29 pm...gone; 6.51 next, but that too mostly gone; and so on. That, and the distant, comforting, and at times - especially now as each dreary minute ticked away - annoying, song of the lapwing.

The project manager peered from under his brow and let his gaze skim across each one of us. He had a grin plastered on his face, an idiotic grin that every body in the team hated him for. That was just one of the things, the least significant thing, that he was despised for.
Then, he let out a long, noisy sigh. We heard a muffled sniff follow immediately and all eyes turned in that direction. It was his minion who sat across him, perched on a book cupboard, weeping and daubing her nose and eyes with a handkerchief.

"Well..." he, the despicable project manager, finally said. A word was finally uttered, I thought, but then I think I thought too soon. The grin, which was supposed to be a wan smile, returned to the manager's face.

"What do I say...Really..." He called out to his minion. "You...want to say something?"

No she did not. Instead, her muffled sob changed to a whine, a low-pitched, excruciatingly painful sound like chalk skidding on the blackboard. One would weep like that if there were a death in the family, or if the person failed a university exam, or lost a limb in an accident.

"What will she say!" he answered for her, and again, fretful eyes turned back from minion to Master. "What do you guys do over here....really, I...I don't know how to...You know, you know, you have any idea what the client said..." he continued, his hands flailing like the Italian What-the-fuck gesture. Gradually, after two hours of being held hostage in a meeting room, it finally dawned upon us - after dusk - that the client reported a few bugs in the courseware that we uploaded. That was it. That was what all there was to this melodrama.

For two or three months, this had been the story of our lives. Every evening when it was time to head home, Master and minion called for a meeting and did this. For a particular meeting, the HR manager was asked to join and play ring master while these two characters doubled up as buffoons. That circus began at 5 pm and went on till 11 that night. That was supposed to be a taking-stock and pepping-up meeting. What it did instead was flatten us to the ground.

Maybe the lapwing's call on that particular evening was a beckoning for all of us to break out of the corporate shackles and head out, quite literally, to the great outdoors. Which we did, a few weeks later when we could not endure any more of those histrionics. That call culminated into the first bike trip of the trippy tipplers to a beach town called Kashid. More about that later.