Lost Birds

An essay from the archive: shortlisted for Class Action Nature Writing Prize 2021

Jun 16, 2023

Some context to this essay:

Back in April 2021 – just weeks after my Mum had passed away from a brief illness – I made this essay. I’d been note-keeping throughout the last weeks of my Mum’s life, walking through our local woods daily and making cut-up poems. Britain had just left the EU and over 100,000 Punjabi farmers held a historic and massive protest against the damning Farmer’s Bill on the outskirts of Delhi. Charged with the intensity of raw grief - this essay arrived in my being and channelled through my pen almost fully formed - reflecting the mash-up of all the happenings and makings of those moments.

Hours before the deadline was due, I submitted it for the Class Action Working Class Nature Writing Prize 2021 with no expectations. Lost Birds made the top three shortlist. My first ever submission. Since then, Lost Birds has influenced a film poem I made for Being Human Festival in Sheffield and published in a limited edition anthology, Intrinsic (Creative Countryside). I’m so happy to now be able to share this piece with yourselves, as part of A Wild Archive. I reckon this writing stuff is magic and I reckon my Mum had a hand in the magic this essay created - thank you Rishpal Kaur 🙏🏽💓

A little handmade lifafa for Mum’s last flight: containing photos of her children (I’m the one on the left) and my Dad, a tiny piece of fruit cake made by my sister which Mum loved, two tiny chapattis made by her daughter-in-law to honour all her years of seva making chapattis at the Gurdwara and a knitted square, collaboratively knitted by all her daughters.

My Mum’s last breath took flight during the Hindu festival of Holi, a celebration of the arrival of spring, of love and of healing broken relationships. Released with relief and minimal effort, and after the horrific and natural wonder of powering her body down via starvation and morphine, I wondered if that last breath got tangled in the lacy net curtains of her home of the last 62 years, or whether it had managed to slip through the tiny holes, grab a ride on a Sheffield breeze, defy star paths and find its way back over nine- thousand miles to Null – District Jalandhar, Punjab. Meeting the echoes of jaded plains, sadhus and partitions, simran prayers mingling with the explosion of fuchsia, orange, violet and turmeric powders, seeking rivers and reunification.

Soaring

towards a fleeting blast of colours,

you are a reimagination

of the English sky

leaving a trail

after the star path ends.

Find the holy river, the Sutlej.

the ancient yet timeless

ritual of reuniting

soul to soul with

the things that really

matter when you’ve gone.

Tomorrow my Mum, sheltering in woven Sussex willow, shimmering with sprinkled rose petals, a tiny wheat chapatti secreted under her right hand, will meet fire at Grenoside Crematorium, Sheffield. After her flesh and muscle have disappeared, her bones will be ground to dust. Then Dust-Mum will have to wait for her last flight home. I wonder if her last breath has made it home already. Or is it waiting, caught under a peacock wing or in a temple monkey’s fist? Waiting for the moment to reunite with the rest of her and blow her shining particles into the surges of the River Sutlej? I wonder about her &

ancestral wildness

something greater than

lived by the land

by the wits

and at the will of

possibility –

myth and wild

planets, star paths,

seasons and earth-promises,

Gurus and grandmothers

shaped by folklore

made of places

My Mum – scythe-tongued, worry-hearted, ox-strong, untamed by colonial sensibilities – Gurmukhi gushing furious rapids through her lips rather than rippled words from the guru’s mouth. Her necessary language of survival, migration and arrival into smog and steel – nineteen fifty-nine. I think of her and her landmother Punjab as wild places. Around Null, wildness oozes everywhere from honey-burst bee colonies to haze-stoned buffalos to day trips where rupees are thrown at Baba Deep Singh’s temple, to the village sadhu with coils of locks trailing the ground singing prayers into the ears of rabid dogs, and turmeric roots drying gold on the roof. And then I ask myself, why do I label this ‘wild’? It’s just the way they live, have lived. For a very long ever.

I think of my cousin brothers, unshaven, who plough fields, scythe wheat, observe the stars and moon for the right moments to plant and plough and harvest, old knowledge shared by old hands and hearts, camping with tens of thousands of other farmers, on the periphery of Delhi – resisting big corporations who will drive down the costs of their crops, of their hard work, hand work, heart work. They are an ecotone, dwelling between land practices imprinted in DNA and corporations that pillage soil, leaving them debt trapped and starving. Unlike my Mum, some will force their last breath forward. What does it take to set fire to yourself when your heartland is violated, despoiled of life and purpose? To leave behind everything you love because you realise that your God who gets you through droughts and floods cannot save you from the slam-crush of the God of corporations and politics?

Are these farmers, my ancestors, ‘wild’? Was my Mum wild too, once sucking fragrant syrup from split sugarcane? Am I wild because my bones came from her? Will her last breath find the ears of my cousin brothers? Saying you are un-re-arrangeable by fate, by migration, by empire or by genetically modified seeds. Will she tell them to stay strong, be the edge, keep planting seeds of resistance? Will she tell them we have never been wild, that we were labelled untamely by an empire near-far away? That we were folk and kin who knew how to live and protect the lands and the birds and the loves we were given in the most natural of ways? Will her last breath come back, find my ears and tell me the same things too?

Mum disappeared and every day I cross the road from those lacy net curtains, walking into the understory, searching for last breaths – reuniting with lost oaks and ash and birch that were my teenage backbones, holding me steel-strong when rivers of blood still haunted my unbelonging. Everything is surging upwards and outwards, a mass of green wonder thrust into a post-Holi sky, with the odd fleck of early bluebell, late snowdrop and primrose. I am salt-soaked, curve-necked and slow until a beat from beyond slips into my heart – a great woodpecker gives me the dhol, ddddrrrrrrrah, a nuthatch adds a tak tak...takka and the quiet tssss tssss tssss of a treecreeper joins in before offering its melodious tinkle, the Lata Mangeshkar of woodland birds. I walk into wild and its meanings and shapings – colonisations and commercialisations. Its trap and its beauty, its dualities and force. And I am bewilded and bewildered with every footstep. I love the word wild but, the way I wear it and hold it, roll it around my tongue feels thin, tainted, worn out and crude. How do I find my rewild? I summon the all-night visitation of fringe- feathered-wardens, their witnessing of rattled breath and fading.

Bring back lost birds

jadoo the emptying sky

rekindle our connection with

their mysterious custody of knowledges

kala-neela vigil of the tawny ones

wearing hope and warning

chanting our family through

this substantial night

I remember how it felt

everything vital and fleeting

the unintended wonder

of your disappearance.