In the fork of a branch on the neem tree, a crow's nest: an artless, untidy tangle of twigs, with stray strands dangling in the air; a pair of birds hopping in and out, arranging the twigs with their beaks. So that is what a crow's nest looks like! Must tell G. He had enquired about the nesting habits of the common crow when I had described to him the weaverbird's meticulously crafted, pendulous homes I had seen in a eucalyptus tree in Lalitpur, in Nepal.
It was the crow's nest that had first drawn my attention to the old neem tree, and beside the tree, the house – the house with a quaint fence at 54 Chowringhee Lane, Calcutta.
Stepping out of the medical facility where my brother's MRI was being done, I had looked up, spying first the crow's nest in the tree and then the house. A blue sweater was hanging over the wooden fence at the door-front. A couple of red-oxide-painted steps led up to the door. There were flowerpots on either side, against the ochre-coloured wall: a money plant, some crotons with variegated leaves, a sansviera with tall spikes, a few mums. The afternoon light, filtering through the sickle-shaped, saw-toothed neem leaves, was making delicate filigrees on the red steps.
It was the teal blue, two-and-a-half foot tall, swing-out fence fixed at the front of the door that was most unusual – the first of its kind I had seen here in Calcutta: a number of vertical spikes of wooden shafts, spaced by a couple of inches and nailed together by one diagonal and two horizontal bars. Betty Keyes, the 73-year-old Anglo-Indian lady who lives there and who I would soon get to know, told me that they had the fence made when her husband – Frank Keyes, ex-District Commissioner of the Lalbazar Police Department in Calcutta – had kept a ferocious Doberman named Kimmy.