A Tragicomedy in Four Acts
Act I: The Dignified Arrival
It had started as such a promising morning. Kali — the Greater Coucal who ruled the coconut palm outside Building No. 4 — had woken up with a very clear agenda. Find a fat grasshopper. Maybe a small lizard. Definitely NOT become a subject of wildlife photography.
But then the clouds came. And with the clouds came the rain. And with the rain came… that man with the camera.
Kali turned her back to the lens with the practiced disdain of a celebrity ignoring paparazzi.
Her glossy chestnut wings were now doing that particularly unflattering thing where each feather drooped separately, like a very expensive shawl ruined at a wedding. She sat atop the creeper, tail fanned out in what was supposed to be a majestic pose but now looked like a wet mop auditioning for a nature magazine.
“Do NOT photograph me right now,” she communicated through the rigid set of her shoulders.
The shutter clicked anyway.
Act II: The Confrontation
Dripping, puffed up, and deeply unimpressed, Kali turned around.
The red eye — that famous, smoldering red eye that had made lesser creatures flee in terror — was now deployed at full intensity, directed squarely at R. Radhakrishnan and his telephoto lens.
“Excuse me,” said the eye. “EXCUSE me.”
“Are you,” continued the eye, with barely contained fury, “actually photographing me right now? ME? Like this? Have you NO shame?”
Her feathers were sticking up in seventeen different directions. There was a small palm fiber caught in her tail. She was fairly certain she looked like a bird that had been put through a washing machine on the wrong setting.
And there he was. Not helping. Not offering a single grasshopper. Just… clicking away.
“I have a RED EYE,” she announced to no one in particular.
“I could curse you. In three traditions.”
Click. Click. Click.
Act III: Maximum Indignity
Things, somehow, got worse.
The rain intensified. Kali huddled deeper into the palm frond, wings pulled tight, looking less like the apex predator of her garden territory and more like a very grumpy feather duster. Every photograph being taken right now was going to end up on the internet. She was certain of it.
Her cousin Kaalo — arriving late as always — landed beside her, took one look at the situation, and immediately tried to make himself as small as possible. This did not work. He looked like a black-and-rust colored cotton ball that had rolled into a monsoon.
“Is he still here?” Kaalo whispered.
“He is ALWAYS still here,” Kali hissed back.
“Did he bring anything?”
“Does he EVER bring anything?”
They both stared at the lens. The lens stared back. The shutter clicked.
“I want a mango worm,” said Kaalo. “I have been sitting in the rain for forty minutes and I want a mango worm and instead I am getting photographed.”
“Welcome,” said Kali, “to my entire life.”
Act IV: The Last Straw
The sun peeked out briefly — that brief, mocking Kerala sun that appears between showers just long enough to make everything worse — and dried approximately one feather on Kali’s left wing.
She had had enough.
She threw her head back. She opened her beak wide. She let out the call that had, in Indian folklore, been associated with omens, monsoon predictions, and general divine displeasure — that deep, resonant “coop-coop-coop” that rolled across the garden like thunder.
What she was actually saying, translated loosely, was:
“FEED. ME. NOW. You absolute menace. I have been sitting in this rain since before breakfast and you have photographed me from seventeen angles and I look TERRIBLE and somewhere a frog is living its best life and I DESERVE THAT FROG and if you click that shutter ONE MORE TIME I swear on the feathers of my ancestors I will build my nest directly outside your bedroom window and call at 4 AM every single morning until you learn some basic RESPECT—” Click.
Kali relocated to a different palm tree.
The photographs, however, were magnificent.
She has not forgiven him.
🙏 Namaste