I wrote this post as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWebClub Bangalore. It was inspired by the prompt for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival: second person birds.
When I was ten or twelve, Dad had a brief interest in keeping birds. This post is about the ducks incident.
(Honestly, they could’ve been geese. I can’t say for sure now. I’m going to go with ducks.)
On my parents’ wedding anniversary one year, Dad called home from work and told the entire family that he had something special planned for Mom. This was a time before cellphones, so this was all the information we got out of him before he hung up his office landline.
The whole family—me, my brother, Mom, and our grandparents—spent the rest of the day waiting eagerly for him to come home. He got back just as the sun was setting and parked our old Maruti 800 in the verandah. We sensed his excitement as he asked everyone to come outside and gather around the back of the car.
When we were all outside and had displayed the appropriate level of enthusiasm, he opened the boot of the car with the air of a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Out stepped two ducks.
I don’t know what any of us was expecting, but it was definitely not this. Mom was so bewildered by the giant white birds now pecking at things in the verandah that she forgot to be angry at Dad. My grandparents just shook their heads, while me and my brother were thrilled with this new addition to the family.
There were questions. Like: where will the ducks live? Or: don’t ducks need a lot of water to survive? Or, most importantly: who the fuck told you that ducks made for good anniversary gifts?
I’m sure my parents had some, uh, disagreements about the presence of the birds in our lives, but we had them and we couldn’t just let them loose in the city. So we had to figure out a way to keep them healthy and happy.
We made a haphazard coop for them on the rooftop using bits of old furniture. Dad bought the biggest plastic tub they would sell him and filled it with fresh water every few days. In the morning, we’d let the ducks out of the coop and dad would spray them with water from a hose. We’d let them walk around the rooftop in the daytime, where they’d peck at the bird feed we’d scattered around and stick their necks out of the railing at the edge of the rooftop to watch people passing by.
There were honks. Loud ones. They echoed across a neighborhood that was otherwise distinctly lacking in waterfowl. Soon enough, everyone figured out where the ducks lived, and we were known as that family that had ducks on the rooftop for some reason. In the evening, mothers would bring around their kids so they could look at the birds. Many kids got pecked that summer.
At night, the task of getting the ducks back into their enclosure fell to me and my brother. We were young at the time, and these ducks were not small. Every night, we’d spend half an hour trying to herd them into the coop, and get pecked, smacked, and pooped on in the process. Did you know birds can smack you with their wings? I didn’t, but then I got smacked.
After six months, Dad decided he’d had enough. I don’t know if it was the upkeep, the parade of children and their parents ringing our doorbell at all times, the bruises, or the noise, but he decided to let the ducks go.
One Sunday morning, me, my brother, and our parents went to a nearby lake, where we let the ducks go. We were concerned that that they wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild, but they seemed to do okay.
For a few months, we visited the lake to check if our birds were doing well. They had found a family with another group of ducks that lived in the same lake.
And that’s end end of the ducks incident.
