…or the thanksgiving of passerines.
I do not remember how and when the title had first occurred to me. A scattering of birds. Weightless like birds breaking into a flight, faint like dots when seen from afar. I was writing haikus at the time and the phrase seemed comforting for a book of sparse, inconsequential lines of poetry. It was to be a small collection of travel poems.
Somewhere after the third poem, the desire to write haikus on cities and sights grew absentminded. Writing poetry became scarce and writing in general, when not for an academic piece or a professional commitment, equally rare.
The title, however, how should one put it, lingered, surfacing as a suitable name for any new, fleeting literary ambitions that cornered me. Two years ago, it was to be a book on Belgharia, a resettlement camp for those who relocated from Noakhali, Bangladesh. Although neither my brother nor I grew up there, our parents often fed us stories of those who had migrated and built from scratch a new belonging and a sense of home. Some lives were tragic, some peculiar, and some were at the forefront of the Naxal agitation. But all were unrelatable, and at times, almost fictional.
The Scattering of Birds now rests for a difficult book. The book on my father. Who I have lost, and who I have not given up on finding again.
