Byomkesh Pakshi Ep 2 - Tip tip barsa paani...lekin kahaan se?

Mostly mundane and seldom mysterious cases involving birds and other flying beings.

Do you ever have the feeling that one of your senses captured something that defies logic? Seeing things that possibly couldn’t have been there? Voices heard that you couldn’t make sense of, but your mind can’t process them even when repeated from memory? A touch that your body says happened but you can’t tell how?

Such instances, when they do happen, shake me to my core. I don’t know why. It’s as if the entire logic between a stimulus and the response to it has been momentarily disembodied. A glitch in my mind’s meaning-making matrix. Error 404 at the centre of my Randomly Access Memory. 

I’ve been getting that feeling a lot of late. Like a recurring dream, I have this sensation of tiny droplets of water falling on my body. Faintly sensual in a way that the drops barely leave a mark once they touch me. An eerie sensation to not be in touch with the source of a touch and an experience that you can’t fully recount from memory. 

The first time it happened was when I was having lunch sitting on the stone bench outside Vasundhara, the dining area at the Bhoomi campus. I felt like I was in an episode of The Flintstones seated on the stone bench, sharing meals with my friends and foes. Mosquitoes being one of the two. A Honge tree provides respite from the sun beating down. It’s when I was digging into my Bisi Bele Bath that I felt a cold plop on my arm. I looked up and had the ‘glitch in the matrix’ moment. Clear blue sky.

The second time it happened was when I was standing in front of the Bhoomi office. This time what I felt was a stream instead of a drop. The third time it happened was when I was engrossed in photographing a paradise flycatcher and I could sense a plop on the camera. 

Tip tip barsa paani…lekin kahaan se?

Suspect 1 - My mind

This first suspect I did not want to probe into much. That’s because this suspect and I have had a rocky yet long relationship that I have only recently come to terms with.

I can sometimes be an unreliable narrator. It’s because I feel my mind is often screwing with me. Memories seem to be adding newer flavours as I age. Some of the memories have become cinematic by retelling and some have added lenses and filters as my values and perspectives have evolved. Did I subconsciously desire this event to be mysterious? What if I was imagining the droplets? I snap out of it, when I realise that even if I had imagined it once, it was unlikely that it would happen thrice. And unlike a recurring dream or visualisation, the impact of the droplets wasn’t in the same place. So I discard the ‘it’s psychosomatic’ theory.

Suspect 2 - Trees

L-R: Raintree, African Tulip and Honge

Trees do possess a lot of water and are in my eyes, prime suspects. They were present at the scene of the crime on all three instances. I’ve read about processes where the leaves of trees (or plants) release drops of water - guttation and transpiration. Some of their names and behaviour is suspicious as well. RAIN tree? I’ve known that tree to unexpectedly drop water on people as a prank. I was standing under a raintree in the third instance. African Tulip tree, with its water pistol like flower buds that I have myself used to prank people. Also, it was present at the site of the second incident. 

Could it be trees? M. Night Shyamalan’s movie The Happening seemed to suggest that trees are capable of much more sinister things than gently dropping water droplets on people’s arms and cameras. Trees do communicate with each other through the Wood Wide Web so it’s not implausible that they decided to transpire collectively. Still, guttation, the secretion of droplets of water from the pores of leaves, happens mostly in plants and it would mean more than one leaf would release droplets. And the droplets would have been visible. The raintree needs rain to hold on to the droplets and the African Tulip bud needs to be squeezed for the watery nectar to squirt out. The Honge tree does not seem to have an obvious source of water. 

If it wasn’t a tree, then what could it be?

Suspect 3 - Birds

L-R: Sunbird and Flowerpecker

Birds love to drop things. The Honge tree is visited regularly by tiny birds like sunbirds and flowerpeckers. These birds are small enough to justify the size of the droplets. But do birds even pee? They do but not the way we do it. They do it along with their doodoo. They like to mix no.1 and no.2 up. (https://www.livescience.com/do-birds-pee). Do they sweat? No they dont (https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/birds/do-birds-sweat). Do they salivate? Was a sunbird looking at my Bisi Bele Bath and drooling? Some of the birds seem to produce saliva but not in the same manner that we do (https://www.outlifeexpert.com/do-birds-have-saliva/). While it might explain incidences 1 and 3, it does not explain 2. And the possibility of a bird salivating looking at my Nikon D3400 is extremely low. 

I realise that detective-ing is clearly draining work. With multiple suspects and no obvious lead, I was drained. I decided that I need to rest for a little bit before restarting my investigation. And what better place to rest but the first scene of the crime. I lay down on the stone slab under the Honge tree.

I shut my eyes and immediately the other sense start perking up. The skin could feel the roughness of the stone, its temperature and the tickle of the black ants that can be often found scurrying around to pick off the crumbs leftover from lunch. I could smell the cow dung being carried to the garden by our gardener annas, Muniraju and Eeranna. I could taste the oil and salt from the copious amount of Khara Boondi that I had consumed along with the Bisi Bele Bath. I could hear the sunbirds, bulbuls, drongos and babblers babbling. I thought the bulbuls were making a strong case. 

Beneath the bird calls, hid another layer of sound, a constant buzzing. I am dragged back to suspect number one as I believe it’s my own ear creating the sound. I snap out of my mental Tinnitus and drown out the noise of the traffic to try and locate the source of the sound. The sound seemed to be coming from the trees but I found it difficult to locate it as there wasn't any obvious visual movement. It didn’t help that the buzzing was constant, for minutes together without a pause. So it felt like coming from anywhere and everywhere. 

I noticed an unusual bump on the Honge tree. I move closer to it and could see what appeared to be the outline of an insect. I squinted but that just hurt my eyes, so I chose to look at it through my camera. 

Is that a…Cicada?

I had never seen one but had heard them, and of them, a lot. The sounds they generated seemed to come sans any visible movement of their bodies. Note to self: must research how they make noise without moving and share that information with all children in schools and with budding ventriloquists. 

Suspect no. 4 - Cicada

Do Cicadas release water from their various orifices? Oh god, please let it be an oral ejaculate. Please. Cicadas, it turns out, do a lot of whizzing apart from buzzing. One of nature’s loudest callers seemingly go crazy when they get nature’s call. They don’t deal in measly droplets but in powerful jet streams. Sounds unbelievable? It did to me, until I saw this, and many other such videos.

So incident 2 was clearly the projectile body art of a Cicada. What about the occurrences in the other two instances? What explains them? I might have a suspect.

Suspect no. 5 - Another insect (?)

If Cicadas pee, is it not possible that other insects pee as well? And as I feared, some insects do like to take a leak. Ones that either live on tree sap or leaf juices. Most of the pee-ing insects seem to believe in the adage, ‘boond boond girne se banta ek dariya hai’. And one of these insects is called the ‘sharpshooter bug’, that lives primarily on a liquid diet of leaf juices and needs to empty itself a lot!

Based on video evidence, it is safe to say that incident no.1 and incident no.3 were most likely caused by a sharpshooter. While I haven’t seen one in the Bhoomi campus yet, I have surely felt them. Time for me to find these insects that shoot from the tip.

Tip tip barsa…keedon ka sussu.

Copyedited by Pipson aka Pipbhai, fact checked by Rakesh aka Mowgli and illustration by Urvi aka UrVi RaYs.