Kokila naade:

Why the Avurudu Koha sings these days

S. PATHIRAVITANA

It seems we have got it all wrong about why the Avurudu Koha sings early in the mornings these days. He is not telling us that Avurudu is near and we must get about making the usual kavung and kokis. Oh no, he has other motives and interests.

According to my bird fancier friend, Jagath Gunawardena, a lawyer by profession but who is happy studying birds and insects in his spare time, the Avurudu Koha is a real mischievous rascal.

If we let our foreign friends join our conversation, let me tell them that the Avurudu Koha is the same bird as their Cuckoo.

The only difference is that this same act of heralding its name is done in June and not before April as we have it here.

And I have heard their medieval poets putting it into verse like this - in ‘June, lhude sings cuckoo.’

But to come back to our naughty Avurudu Koha, these early calls he gives are not to put us up from our slumber but is targetted at a fellow member of the koha family - the crow.

Koha and crow

The cuckoo’s song, which is generally welcomed by everybody, is utterly disliked by the crow. The music of the koha is lost on the crow and the moment he hears it, it starts giving chase to the crow.

The koha is not playing a game of hide and seek with the crow by taunting it, but cleverly drawing it away from the nest it has built so that Mrs Koha can lay her eggs during the unguarded nest in the time the crow is chasing the cuckoo.

It is said that when the animals were instructed at the beginning of time in the art of building nests and other resting places for them, the Koha told his Maker, “Nest building is not a craft worthy of learning. You put a stick this way, another that way and lay a third over both and go on doing this. There is nothing more to it,” he said and fled the scene.

But when it actually came to building nests the Koha came a cropper. That is the time he turned to use the nest built by his cousin the crow as a chamber for his wife to lay her eggs. And this ploy has worked for centuries.

Nest

Our poets too have noted this ploy of the Koha to use the nest of the crow for its own family purposes and one of our poems, the Kokila Sandesaya, though not as well known as the Hansa, Selalihini, Gira etc, makes a moral point in its poem about seeking or being nourished by alien cultures. As a result this sandesaya is also known as the Paraputu Sandesaya (paraputu in Sanskrit means para poshanaya - nourished by aliens).

kokila

An interesting point about the elevation of the koha as a music maker in our culture is the name kokila it has received in the Sandesaya named after it. Even today musical excellence is denoted by this term.

As a result we have among us Kokila Devis and as Amaradeva tells us there is also kokillayange kokilla naade. What I am surprised is that when we have such an excellent singer in our Magpie, commonly known as the pol kichcha, why, I wonder, has our Magpie not been promoted as a kokilaya.

Come to think of it, both these birds are not natives of this country. The Koha, they say, is the India Koel while our pol kichcha is the northern hemisphere’s Magpie. While everything pleasant has come along with the Indian Koel the Magpie is very much a bird of ill omen over in the country of its birth.

But, locally, I do not think that we take the ill omens of the Magpie any too seriously. As a city bred boy almost the first thing I learnt about the Magpie was that it was

One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for wedding
Four for boy

But when I spent my holidays in the village, the pol kichcha, far from being treated as an ominous bird, was not taken notice of any too seriously at all. Nobody paid any special attention to it as being either ominous or benefic and letting the fellow fly around looking for worms, his special delight.

And after discovering a particularly lush one, as it were, he bursts into a brilliant song, a real kokila naade of the kokilayange. Why the pol kichcha’s singing has not been taken seriously enough to present him with a polkchchi Sandesaya may be because he is not a consistently brilliant songster.

Magpie

In the morning, for instance, he is truly magnificent, but at sun down he is really flat, almost bereaving the disappearing sun. To judge from the poor reception the Magpie has had abroad I am beginning to wonder whether this bird of ill omen in Britain has ever sung a note.

Had it the singing qualities of our pol kichcha its reputation may have been saved. But now its ominous qualities have been determined by its bi-colour of black and white.

Here is the reaction of one born and bred in Britain to Magpies. He is the Radio 4 presenter Paddy O’Connell. The BBC recently featured his reactions. O’Connell says, “ Like millions around the land, I like birds...I wake to bird song, even in the middle of a big city and I have a sort of fascination for chickens. But I have learnt to draw the line. I don’t like magpies at all.”

Such vehemence in the case of O’Connell may have to be understood as a consequence of the power of superstition over our minds that may have prevailed in his childhood.

Evil

As a Magpie has been known to forebode ill, children are expected to cut off the evil by repeating a ritual formula at the sight of this bird which goes like this, “I salute, I spit, and I count down from one to ten.”O’Connell is not trying to make the reader see things as he sees them. Only to tell what happened to him when he saw the bird once:

Lone magpie

“Motionless it remained. Minutes passed, and I remembered it later as we mourned a death in our family that seemed to follow this odd event. Close up a magpie isn’t black and, even its feathers fool you. There’s a blue hue there that seems to linger at the corner of your eye.

The sight of another lone magpie still stops me short. Far from wanting the numbers to halve, I instantly want them to double. I scan the horizon looking for its mate. If I fail to find it, I salute, I spit and I count down from ten, Sometimes I do all three although never on my motor bike, because then I reckon the magpie may get me too.”