Every family has a room where its real life happens. Ours has always been a balcony.
It isn’t the drawing room, with its cushions reserved for guests. It isn’t the dining table, which has quietly become a filing cabinet. It’s the balcony. Two chairs. Two cups. One slightly guilty pair of binoculars.
For over a decade, that balcony sat at the edge of Kaziranga. For the last two years, it has sat at the edge of a main road in Pune.
Let me explain the difference. It will take two cups of tea.
The First Cup: Kaziranga
We lived on the first floor of a lovely bungalow owned by Mrs Borah. Baideu, as everyone called her, did not own a garden. The garden owned her.
She grew everything: hibiscus, ixora, marigold and climbing creepers. She knew which plant each butterfly liked, the way a good aunty knows which nephew likes extra sugar. Her garden was a restaurant, and the customers had wings.
Sunbirds came first, shimmering like someone had spilt petrol in sunlight. They hovered, sipped, bickered and left without paying. White-eyes arrived in gangs, tiny and green, with white rings around their eyes as if they had been up all night studying.
Doves cooed their one sad song on loop. Munias sat in neat rows on the wire like schoolchildren waiting for a photograph. Mynas walked around the lawn like building secretaries inspecting parking violations.
And damselflies. Delicate little things, so thin and so blue that you wondered how they survived the monsoon.
On Bihu mornings, a steel plate of warm pitha would climb the stairs before we had finished our first cup. It always came with the same instruction from Baideu: “For the birdwatchers. Don’t feed the mynas.”
We always fed the mynas. The mynas always told her.
Our routine was sacred. Nalin and Shiven left for school by six. By 6:05, Kiran and I were on the balcony with the first round of cha, Grimmett’s bird guide open on the table and two pairs of binoculars ready like a pair of retired colonels on a hill-station verandah.
“Is that a scarlet-backed flowerpecker?”
“It’s a leaf.”
“It’s a very scarlet leaf.”
We argued over Grimmett the way other couples argue over money. Kiran usually won. Grimmett usually agreed with her.
The Winter Parade
Then came winter, and the sky became a railway station.
Kaziranga is dotted with around two hundred wetlands, the beels, and every winter, visitors from Central Asia, Siberia and the Tibetan plateau flew in to use them. They had crossed deserts and mountain ranges. Some had flown over the Himalaya. And the final approach to their winter home took them right over our balcony.
They came in every style.
Bar-headed geese honked like an Ambassador taxi stuck behind a tractor. Always talking. Always complaining. Probably about the Himalaya.
Ducks flew in tight arrowheads, whistling softly, all business, like chartered accountants in March.
Some flew so low you could count their feathers. Kiran would duck. The birds would not. Some flew so high they were just a pencil line drawn across the sky, a flock going somewhere important without telling us.
And some flew in total silence. That was the most beautiful part. Hundreds of wings passing overhead, and all you could hear was your own tea going cold.
That’s when we graduated to the second cup.
The Street Wakes Up
By the second cup, the birds were joined by people.
Our street had three institutions, and between them, they held the whole town together.
There was CNB College, the only science college in the area. Every morning, young boys and girls walked towards it with textbooks under their arms and a very particular light in their eyes. Half of it was ambition. Half of it was love. You could never tell which half was for chemistry.
Some came on bikes, riding in pairs, one pretending to study the road. Most came on foot. And some came on e-rickshaws with shock absorbers so tired that every pothole produced a small group dance. The whole vehicle bounced. Six students bounced. The driver bounced. Nobody complained.
Then there was the dance school. Little girls in hair buns walked in, carrying ghunguroos, and soon the street filled with the soft chhum-chhum of anklets, the rhythm of an old classical tradition being carefully handed to young feet.
And there was the naamghar, the prayer hall. Its dhols and chants drifted over the garden, gentle and unhurried. It was a place of faith, but also of village meetings, community feasts and quiet reconciliations. If two neighbours had quarrelled, the naamghar usually made them share a meal and forget why.
Birds above. Students below. Anklets to the left. Prayer to the right. Tea in the middle.
We didn’t know we were rich. That’s the thing about being rich in time. Nobody sends you a statement.
The Hornbill Next Door
Then, one year, a pair of great hornbills began nesting in a ficus nearby.
If you have never heard a great hornbill fly, let me describe what it sounds like. It sounds like a steam engine that has learned ballet. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. Huge wings, a yellow casque like a crown, and an expression of complete aristocratic contempt.
The female sealed herself inside the tree hollow. The male did all the food deliveries, flying back and forth with fruit. Diligent. Tireless. Never late.
Kiran watched him for a long time. Then she turned to me.
“See? That’s a husband.”
I finished my tea very quietly.
The Third Cup Never Came: A Balcony in Pune
Two years ago, we moved to Pune.
Our new balcony faces a main road. The first morning, I sat down with my tea and binoculars, full of hope. I heard a bird. I reached for Grimmett.
It was a truck reversing.
Mornings on our road don’t arrive softly. They arrive with a horn. Tyres hiss on tarmac like a constant, angry kettle. Buses groan. Two-wheelers weave like damselflies with road rage. Somewhere, a pressure horn plays a tune nobody asked for.
I tried identifying vehicles with the same seriousness.
Greater Pune Dumper: large, orange, heavy-billed, extremely vocal.
Common Delivery Scooter: small, fast, found everywhere, never stops.
Kiran said this was not helping.
Birds are fewer on our side of the road. Pune itself is full of them: the hills and lakes are busy with birdlife, and every winter the flamingos land at Bhigwan, a short drive away. Our balcony simply faces the wrong direction. Here, visitors come sporadically, like relatives who “will try to come for the wedding.”
And then there’s the dust. It settles on the railing, the chairs and the binoculars. After a week, the lenses make every bird look like it’s in a flashback scene.
And time. Time is the rarest species of all. Office starts early. School starts early.
The Loyal Few
But here’s the thing. Some friends followed us.
A pair of red-vented bulbuls visits most mornings. Cheerful, scruffy, loud, with crests like rockstars who have not slept. The mynas are here too, inspecting our balcony with the same building-secretary energy as their Assamese cousins.
The pigeons, of course, came uninvited. Pigeons in Pune don’t visit balconies. They register them.
Kiran, meanwhile, has been quietly running a small rebellion. She learned more from Mrs Borah than either of them realises. Pot by pot, the balcony has filled with flowering plants, and her hibiscus has been blooming with great determination.
One morning, a purple sunbird turned up, glittering against the dust like a sequin on a work shirt. It sipped, bickered with nobody in particular and left without paying.
Kiran didn’t say anything for a while.
Then: “Baideu would approve.”
It turns out a balcony doesn’t need a garden to become a restaurant. It only needs a menu.
And one morning, a small line of munias sat on the wire across the road. Neat rows. Waiting for their photograph.
Kiran saw them first.
“Look.”
We stood there, the two of us, in the middle of the noise. The trucks didn’t stop. The dust didn’t settle. But for one minute, the balcony was the balcony again.
Grimmett is still on the shelf. The binoculars need cleaning. The second cup of tea is now more of a hurried half-cup.
But the birds haven’t given up on us. So we haven’t given up on them. Somewhere in Kaziranga, Mrs Borah’s garden is still blooming. The geese are still complaining over the Himalaya. The hornbill is still delivering fruit. And here, above a Pune main road, a bulbul is singing louder than a truck.
That’s a pretty good start to the day.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue. The author is a sustainability professional in Pune and Research Scholar at IIT Guwahati.
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