Flocking

Late afternoon light over the rail-line that sits in a little cavern surrounded by ten, twenty and thirty storey buildings. Buses with their horns queueing for the terminal beyond. The last forty-eight hours confined to the room and the window for outlook, when suddenly the larger confinement struck with some sharpness. Three times a large flock of dark birds had wheeled over in formation from the south, the water-side; two passes in-close and the third a hundred and more metres high. Dotted cloud swarms with undulating narrow wings diving and surging over this massed concrete. How long it had been! In the last week the realization had come that there were no seagulls on the shores of the equator. Were these then the pigeons that the hole-in-the-wall Indian store-keepers fed around the corner from Muthu? Middle-class children in Singapore possibly come to witness such events on holidays in foreign parts. There were certainly pigeons in the southern republic, they were poisoned regularly by the Enviro. men. Too large for starlings these here.