Two Birds in a Bush

27 Feb, 2025

I’ve always had a distaste for travel literature. Pages comprising self-aggrandising, tittering talk of adventure, often undertaken by young men in their twenties who feel gloriously untethered. I got through 30% of On the Road before I realised the book was just an excuse to hitchhike from one place to another, befriend strangers and drink through sorrows. I’m sure the subtleties were lost on me. With my moral standing out of the way, however, let me tell you about my travels which despite my previously stated disdain for the genre, I must share. After all, a girl’s gotta write.

This is a recounting of a 4-day trip to Orissa. I grew up in Bangalore (located in South India) and I’ve felt disconnected from Orissa (located in East India) which is where my father is from. It’s a beautiful state – very traditional (sometimes to a fault) with gorgeous landscapes and ornate historic temples. I fall somewhere between tourist and local in Orissa – someone who belongs but has never actually been, a ‘fish out of water’ forced to go for a swim. My Odia has the self-confidence and gravitas of Twizzlers. I speak it in stuttering, trailing incomplete sentences. In sharp contrast to the countless blog posts, I write in these familiar technological confines.

Mangalajodi, Chilika:

The main intention of this trip was to meet my grandparents in Puri because we hadn’t seen each other in over 3 years. Instead, I spent 50% of my time in the mangroves of Chilika trying to spot some birds. Chilika, for the less ornithologically inclined, is one of the largest brackish lakes in Asia which makes it an infamous layover for sweeping throbs of migratory birds. I still remember the first time I squinted through binoculars, struggling not to blink, to take in the sight of thousands of flamingos just 200m in front of me. I was nine. I have that crazy category of parent (self-titled) who happens to be a bird photographer. This made me accustomed to spending countless holidays crouched on a rundown forest trail waiting patiently to glimpse an Oriental White Eye or a Purple Moorhen. It surprised me to see so many birds lounge around when we usually struggled to capture a few.

This is a picture my father took back in 2013 at Chilika.

You may have heard about Chilika, but if you’ve been to Mangalajodi, I tip my Camo hat to you. Mangalajodi is a bit of a birdwatcher haven. It’s at the northern tip of the Chilika lake and used to be wrought with bird poachers. At a point when most of the birds in the area were close to endangered Nanda Kishore Bhujabala ¹ from the ‘Wild Orissa’ organisation stepped in and vitalised the community from poaching to eco-tourism. While his proposition was simple, “you’ll earn more selling the bird sightings from your rowboat than their carcasses on highways”, it still took years of community-wide trust building. But in 2002, People relented when one of the biggest poachers, Kishore Behera, was showing the Bombay Natural History Society around.² The poachers transformed into birding guides rowing across the mangrove channels, with bamboo sticks as oars. Their eyes previously trained to spot birds now learned to identify them as well. “The killer shot” is recontextualised as a bird that just swooped to kill a fish or crab framed holding their prey in their beaks.

Everything in Mangalajodi seems brighter. This could be the sharp sunlight piercing through my hat and sunglasses resulting in a splitting headache. But bird watchers and photographers flocked in from all across the country, paying generously (not always enormously since birdwatching isn’t a thriving economy). There’s a set of unspoken rules in Mangalajodi. And the vast majority of the visitors are in on it. Here, they respect the birds - there are no artificial calls, no loud motor boats, no bait laid out. It’s an honest attempt at capturing a bird - filled with the suspense and mystery of a detective novel as we wonder what rare species will cross our path and when they do, how quickly we can aim and shoot. Thus, a circular ecosystem- birds, spotters, and watchers - formed, all happily co-existing.

In a world maddeningly complicated, it’s one of the few simple fairytales I know. It isn’t without its faults - greed, pride, selfishness, strife– leak into the story like sore plot points. But I’d argue the process has done more good than harm. It’s one of the few hopeful stories I’ve held onto over the years. I’ve been to Mangalajodi twice, 8 years apart. On my first visit, the guides were inexperienced but exuberant - they would grab hold of the birding bible, “Helm Field Guides Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” and frantically turn to a page, pointing to a bird. Back then, their thick Odio accent was nearly indecipherable to me as they gushed “Golden Plougher!”. The scene that met my eyes on my second visit was so heartwarmingly similar. Their accents were just as strong (no code-switching) but my mature ears had a little more luck deciphering.

I am writing not just because I witnessed a fairytale, but because I have seen it last. I don’t know much else that sounds better than an ecological fairytale preserved.

Jagannath Temple, Puri

Puri is a mere 2 hours away from Mangalajodi but people worship by a different set of rules. Puri is one of the “Char (four) Dham” Hindu pilgrimage sites in India; each in one of the four cardinal directions spanning the subcontinent. Tens of thousands flock to the city every year to witness Lord Jagannath. Two of these migrants are my elderly, arthritic grandparents who have chosen to spend a year in Puri solely for their daily pilgrimage to the temple. They’ve resolved to live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a building where the elevator has been broken for a month. They are reluctant to move from this apartment because the red flag hoisted from the temple waves magnanimously in sight.

It’s a huge part of their lives, this temple; and for one day, I played pretend. We entered through the Paschim entrance reserved for the senior citizens and locals- thus skipping a big chunk of the queue. Even then the constant shoving felt aggressive and uncouth; not to mention the policemen spread across the space constantly banging their sticks against the walls, unfailingly scaring me. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the novelty of praying, especially the prasad that followed. But most of my experiences in temples are more about artistry than spirituality.

The walls of the temples are wrapped in religious lore – backstories, villain arcs, and tragic endings. Lore is so ubiquitous to Indian culture that tales of pirate kings and ghostly apparitions are found in Chilika and Mangalajodi too. But those stories don’t seem to have the same SEO traction as the reformed poachers and are harder to locate. Yet the stories of the sculptures in the temples are still incredibly vivid in my life. Just last week I was at an Odissi performance (Odissi is the classical dance from Orissa) where they spoke about how temple sculptures were an integral reference in the dance’s revival in the late 20th century. Since then, however, the temple's lime walls have been eroding. As hordes of people cram into the building, I wonder if this colossal monolith of inspiration is emptying just to have the capacity to hold all of our bodies inside.

After we finished praying (although I doubt I did it right) and paid our dues, we walked around the courtyard. Through the courtyard was the temple market filled with an ungodly amount of sugary treats and other food. We bought lunch sets and headed back to my grandparents' apartment; they refused to eat food that wasn’t prepared in the temple for reasons that are entirely archaic and unjust.

All of this culture is ingrained in me too, a slowly fading tattoo. Maybe I can exist as a translator for this world that I am still not wholly apart from. Orissa is a complicated state, tradition being as much of its glory as its undoing. I see the cracks in the winter soil across the winter river banks of Mangalajodi just as clearly as the fading sculptures on the walls of the Jagannath temple in Puri. But part of being in this generation, jaded & ironic, is realising that not all proverbs hold – A bird in the hand is not worth two in the bush.

That’s the end of my travel log. Maybe you’ve read it all the way through. Or maybe, you reached the 30% mark and realised that I’ve mimicked my nemesis, On the Road, and abandoned the read. In which case, I can proudly proclaim that I was right, travel logs are awful.

#on climate change #on travel