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(Part II)
Farah Ghuznavi
Phobias
are almost always problematic for those who experience them, but there
are undoubtedly some fears that affect peoples' lives on a more
day-to-day basis than others; and therefore require more time and effort
to manage. On the subject of such inconvenient phobias, I was recently
commiserating with a friend who is terrified of dogs. Judging by the
number of canines the average person is likely to encounter in the
course of their life, and the fact that dogs tend to react badly to
anyone who is nervous around them, that particular fear must be a
difficult one to cope with.
However, since that discussion I
have realised that there is yet another set of creatures almost as
inconvenient to have an aversion to as dogs. And these are (drum roll,
please): birds! Most of us who do not suffer from avian phobias rarely
even notice our feathered friends, except perhaps to marvel at the
unfamiliar sound of birdsong in Dhaka, or register some irritation at
the occasional loud cawing of crows in mid-afternoon when you are trying
to have a well-deserved nap. In fact, unless they have just emerged
from a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds", most people don't give
the creatures overhead a second thought.
This
is not, of course, to claim that birds are incapable of being a serious
nuisance. For example, when I was at university in London, our campus
was notorious for harbouring dive-bombing pigeons that would ruthlessly
carry off any food in your hands, often narrowly leaving your fingers
intact. But most of us just dealt with this by making sure we weren't
holding food while walking through the courtyard.
These days apparently London's
pigeons are no longer prone to such hijackings since they have access to
enough leftovers dumped in the various rubbish bins in the city,
particularly by visiting tourists. In fact, it's probably just as well
that they can now stroll over to the nearest garbage can and retrieve
their food, since the Lord Mayor of London expressed concern some time
ago that the pigeon obesity endemic (no, I am not kidding) resulting
from eating so much junk food meant that many of the birds could no
longer fly!!
Fed such stories about the
abundance of edibles, I had in recent years more or less forgotten about
the capacity of birds to behave aggressively towards humans (worms and
rodents were always fair prey, of course. So I was taken aback on a
recent occasion when I met a friend for coffee and we sat outdoors, to
find a crow suddenly swooping down on us for no apparent reason. I was
quite puzzled by it, but my friend seemed particularly rattled. It was
only after the third or fourth time the bird had entered the covered
veranda area where we were sitting, that Anasuya finally confessed that
she was terrified of birds. Under the circumstances, I could only marvel
at her willingness to remain on the veranda after the first couple of
aggressive flurries from the crow.
As it turned out, Anasuya had a
veritable treasury of bad bird stories; and each was more bizarre than
the previous one. In sum, they provided a fairly strong case for
disliking our (false) feathered friends, with or without a preview of
Hitchcock's film. In fact, my friend told me that when she saw the
movie, she had an "aha" moment. She had finally come across someone who,
like her, understood the truth about birds!
Anasuya's problems with these
creatures started when she was very young, perhaps five or six, and
their family lived in one of the old-fashioned bungalow style houses
common in small town India. Sparrows had nested on the upper part of the
windows in their home and one day a young chick fell out of the nest
and somehow landed on the child's head. This may have been, for animal
lovers, one of those classic "they are more scared of us than we are of
them" moments, but you will be hard pressed to persuade my friend about
the truth of such a statement. Instead, she ran through the house with
the baby sparrow perched on (and pecking at) her hair, managing to get
tangled up in it - and even more desperate to get free - in the process.
The rest, as they say, was history as far as Anasuya is concerned.
Not that there weren't moments of
hope. As a young girl, she had clearly blocked out the childhood
incident with the baby sparrow, when she came across - yes, you guessed
it, another sparrow - this time lying unconscious by the side of the
road. The tenderhearted (some might say foolhardy) child attempted to
revive the bird by sprinkling some water on it. It worked. The creature
returned to consciousness with a sudden flapping of its wings, nearly
colliding with her face. This time, she ran screaming away, and there
was no subsequent merciful loss of memory, so things have never been the
same since…
Anyway, as those who suffer from a
phobia will tell you, there are always wicked people willing to exploit
their fears. Like my friend Polly, who has no hesitation in collecting
small bugs from the vegetables when she's cleaning them in preparation
for cooking a delicious array of bhajis. After she is done cleaning, she
displays the insects in order to terrorise her sister Shilpi, who
invariably runs through their flat shrieking whenever Polly holds finger
and thumb together with an unhappy bug trapped between them,
threatening to flick it at her. Polly has no hesitation in abusing her
power to make Shilpi do her will by whipping out and brandishing a bug
as and when necessary. In fact, she quite shamelessly admits that
sometimes all she has to do is pinch her finger and thumb together and
pretend that she is holding a bug, to get the desired level of obedience
from Shilpi!
Of course, sometimes such fears
can have unexpected consequences - as a friend of mine found out some
time ago when she and her husband were out driving in Dhaka's congested
streets. After a spider had materialized unexpectedly on the windshield
of the car, her husband almost had an accident, paralysed at the sight
of the hideous beast so close to him! In order to prevent an imminent
meltdown, my friend actually had to climb out of the 'stalled' car, and
brush the spider off the glass with a stick, before her husband would
resume driving (and yes, you are correct in thinking that names have not
been provided here because I value my friendships…)
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