The common kingfisher is the one with the blue head. The blue-throated barbet principally has green feathers. There is a gang that flocks the lake, converses loudly amongst one another while swimming, then, in a flurry of flapping wings, takes to the sky - while I don’t agree with the superlative that starts off their name, I note their type down: lesser whistling ducks.

In the spring of 2015, I taught myself the art of bird-watching. I had a camera with a 250 mm tele-photo lens, a balcony that looks out into the Bhutan Hills, and afternoons that didn’t comprise software development, corporate meetings and headaches over code bugs.

Rajbari Dighi is an expansive lake located in Jalpaiguri. On clear days, it is crowned with the blue crests and falls of the Himalayas. During Durga Puja, seven years ago, my parents bought a place right next to it, so that we could have a place to stay in every time we wanted to take off to the hills - Darjeeling, Kurseong, Kalimpong. It is our “summer house”, which was christened in autumn, and has seen me through many springs, many new beginnings in my life so far.

It is spring again, and I had taken the overnight train from Kolkata to come and stay here for a while. WFH - Work from Hills. When evening falls, the town wears a darkness so enchanting, that it makes you think of the colour black - of its grace and elegance perceived in the world of fashion. The lake makes the lamp-lights ripple like jewellery woven in gold. On chilly nights like these, this small town takes the form of a solemn young woman, and she holds your hand - because she understands. Because she is just like you.

It is spring again, and I found myself - not with a camera snapping bird photographs, not with a notebook looking up the taxonomy of the aviary kingdom - but crying. The town became witness to me crying over losing people. People who weren’t even in my life when we bought this apartment, when this lake came to be. People whom I was still making memories with the last time I was here - last year in autumn, when the sound of the dhaak was echoing softly from different corners, only to be broken by the siren of a train passing through one fairytale town to the next. New Jalpaiguri to Alipurduar. Siliguri to Hamiltonganj.

Somewhere between controlling my tears and Joni Mitchell playing in my headphones, I understood it too - the art of looking back. How therapeutic it is, how educational it is. How different it is from regret.

Because the last time I was here, I was living the joy and thrill of knowing certain people. The last time I was here, my emotions around them were the opposite. Although it went downhill, it went somewhere. Autumn became spring, nights became days, days became months.

I pulled this idea like a rubber-band, tied it around a bigger flesh of time. When I was here in the spring of 2019, I was waiting for my final semester results, biting my nails because that one paper did not go very well, wondering what that meant for the job offer I had. I was worried about joining the company in the first place, nervous about what moving to a new city entailed. And this time - this very evening with Joni Mitchell and the tears, I had just got off a work day. I was confident with the code I had delivered. I had driven meetings with business leaders. And that glorious city that my office moved me to (where I lived for a blissful eight months before the pandemic started)? Yes, Bangalore - I was hopelessly, unflinchingly, extraordinarily in love with Bangalore. Winter became summer, weeks became months, college girl became working woman, shy girl became fearless woman.

Bigger rubber-band, bigger stretch of time - when we first came here, the lake was nestled in the lap of wild grass and un-walkable mud. Now, Rajbari Dighi is hemmed with grilles, and a walking route has been cemented all around it. There is a small coffee shop under the banyan trees. There are benches and enclosures, where friends, couples and solitude-seekers sit with coffee in their hands. I used to lean dangerously out from my balcony while trying to spot birds, but now, I can catch them right at the base of the branches. I can make a turn from the walkway and go very close to the edge of the lake, where the bronze-winged jacanas and cormorants wade through the water hyacinths. Spring graduated to more springs, days became years, thrill became pain… and this pain shall become something else. Soon.

You’re probably wondering why it took me so long to arrive at a conclusion that Robert Frost had said decades back. You may roll your eyes and ask why I was realizing this only now, when it was there in almost every novel I had grown up with, almost every poem we had to paraphrase for English class. Songwriters said it. I heard it on the Metro while coming home from college. Movie characters said it, and I heard it replay when they came on TV, over and over, through summer, autumn, winter - through all the times when joy became sorrow, and sorrow became joy.

But there is a difference between knowing and understanding. When we know, we help our friends. We take them out for Chinese dinners and talk about what’s hurting them. But when we understand… we simply don’t know what to do. The only thing to do is wait. But the good news is, we need not wait consciously. We need not ask time to progress, because as Robert Frost said -
In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.