It is a normal return from college to my first floor room in Hudson Lane. I put down my bag on the bed, and just as I am about to sit, I find a little feather on the bed.
A feather on my bed? Really strange. I remember properly locking the door of the room before leaving in the morning, and there was nothing else suspicious to be found. Everything untouched, just as I had left, just as it had been there in the morning as I had shut the door – except for the little feather.
I try to survey around it a little, before I decide to pick it up. Yes, it’s a feather, nothing fake about it, but everything strange that can be. Yes, it’s the feather of a bird, but the window was closed, and there’s no other entrance to the room.
If I have to supply a reason to this, I can practically. Perhaps it stuck to my clothes when I was out before this morning, and remained there. Perhaps it left my clothes this morning to rest on the bed, and I had missed seeing it. Perhaps it was flying randomly in the air, carried by the wind like a pollen grain, and had entered clandestinely the moment I had opened the door at some time today or yesterday.
But I don’t feel the need to. The need to supply a logical reason to how the feather chose to enter. It’s a trivial question.
A more pressing question is what to do now, once it is here. Should I brush it away? Should I just ignore, and do what I was about to do? Why is it here even, in the first place?
I sit down, but before that I pick it up. I scan it, then rotate it in my hand, and scan it again from the other side. Who does it belong to? – A sparrow, a crow? Perhaps a pegion.
The feather carries a story, and I can feel it more and more as I see, caught in a trance. It was born and nourished in a family of feathers. Its world was a flying world, and it grew there like a tree. A world that sometimes was at rest, and sometimes in flight. Sometimes it was calm and peaceful and dark, and at other times, quite windy and swift and blue.
And then some day it got uprooted, separated from the other ones, and it found it was in a new world now. A world that was larger but highly mind-boggling.
And then it landed here, on the flat-purple world that my bedsheet is. And now, for the first time, it is seeing eyes – my eyes. It’s a meeting. The eyes are themselves a world, but shielded, distant, but attractive. There’s a fear of being dropped again into a high and mind-boggling world.
Everything depends on the hand that is holding the feather. Possibly everything. What remains mysterious is whether the hand is afraid too.
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