It has startled me, as I stepped under a narrow, V-shape, tent-like opening between the green cloth and porch iron grill. It is perfectly still. No more flights. I have watched it come to the bird bath and wondered what it was. How hard can it be to find a medium size bird, brown, the color of my mother’s eyes, in A Field Guide to the Birds of India? Surely one of the pages would reveal this gentle pilot of the air space of my compound.It has made the wire sway when it landed on the phone line. It has drunk at the bird bath alone, unlike other birds that come in pairs or more. It can’t be that my curiosity is so strong that this brown bird has had to give its life so I can identify it.
Bob Holt was my senior year class president. He was killed in Vietnam. I remember a point at which I felt guilty to realize I was not politically aware then—during the war. It would be at least ten years and after we had children, as if I needed them to awaken me, before I would walk across to the park in Montclair and join the crowd on Memorial Day. Standing apart from the chairs, I had tears come then for Bob.
This bird is causing me to think of the named and the unnamed that die in war. Life has protected me from military enrollments in my family. No military man has been at the front door when the bell called someone to open it, knowing their immediate feelings.
I’ve put the bird in a box in the freezer; it’s been over one hundred degrees in the shade this year. I’m going to take a photograph and search until I find what I can call this trusting, silent visitor putting itself at my disposal for its literal disposal.
Although the distribution map for Brown Rock-chat shows its range as north of Maharashtra State and sites its habitat as quarries, ruins, and old forts, it’s the only all-brown bird I have found in the book.
There’s a chiku tree next to the porch. I will dig deep enough there for a proper burial, christening the unnamed one with a name, even if not its own, so I may repeat more than “for an unnamed friend.”
I lift and lay the soft, easily breakable body into its rough-dirt storage, calling it “my” Brown Rock-chat, then smooth the dirt to lay a white flower on it from the champa tree.
My realization is, “By names we lift ourselves out of the basic labels of man, woman, child, bird, adding to our humanity to bring forth our best giving in unexpected times of loss.”