On the great Tibetan salt route they meet me again/old forsaken friends/ on their faces fatigue of a drunken sleep/their lives worn out/ their legs twisted/ shaking from carrying illustrious flags of bleeding ascents.” No other poem hits my core harder than this masterpiece — “Mules”, composed by an eminent poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma. I am citing this poem because in the doves and other birds that come to visit my rooftop every morning, I see his mules and feel sorry for their inherent suffocation, pain and helplessness - a truly monochromatic realism of a world eroded by the voracious jaws of lackluster development. I infuse into them my problems, ethos and happiness and bring about a relational bondage, and often seek emancipation to enter into another sphere of contemporary reality, where I can interact with a wider spectrum of natural habitats. Now and then I wake up early in the morning and head straight towards our cozy rooftop garden and watch my mother calling the doves as usual, chirruping to them in a melodic note : “ ah ah ah parewa.” Then, along with my mum, I too quickly scatter a mix of food stuffs on the cement surface. Knowing that birds, especially the sparrows and doves are finding it hard to survive in the congested urban heat of Kathmandu, I sit back and survey their struggle for existence, and curse the city folks like me for destroying their habitat in the name of rapid urbanization. There’s nothing like the fecund beauty of spring in Kathmandu. Detached raindrops as exited lovers before their first kiss lie along the twigs of a rose branch — round, sparkling globules — trembling without falling. But it’s hard time for the birds. Roused from their winter stupors, they find food scare and their domicile humid with rain. Dank scuffling begins in the edge of the roof as doves leave their nearby shelters and rush towards my house. Then they lean over the edge and fix me with dark shiny eyes and wait for the sudden appearance of the manna. “Breakfast?” I ask. They lower their head rapidly, spring off to the floor and start picking the grains. Finished, they fly off. It’s goodbye till I wake up the next morning to reenact the same scene once again. — nepalipoet@yahoo.com