Flypast

by ANISHA BHADURI

An Imperial Eagle glided past my sun-dappled window at ten every working day. It usually banked right first and my fists would bunch. Then the raptor would spread its wings wider and dive out of sight.

I reminded myself to look up from my monitor minutes before ten in the morning and occasionally caught a freighter diminishing on the South China Sea. Sometimes, the water was choppy, the blue mostly even. Speedboats, tugboats, and the vessels of weekend anglers were moored like an ending line. The real fishermen—occasionally raucous—kept their distance, their pennants shades of weary red, fluttering steadily. The boats bobbed with the undercurrent. A foghorn might have sliced the thick smell rising from the sea and, occasionally, the mist too. And then I would spot the eagle invariably at ten.

Steadily climbing, it seemed to suck out all sound. From an eighth-floor window facing the sea, I watched it grow, diminish, grow again—a brown blot spreading gracefully. Banking left, losing height, rising again—scaring the gulls. I focused on the bend of the hunter’s beak, the white flecks on its coverts, and waited for it to bite into the glass, into me.

The moment passed.  

There was usually a cup of tea after that and a kind nod from my neighbor—our spaces sliced by intimate blue cardboard, our chairs a matching shade. Even the mugs were homogeneous in this spiffy Hong Kong office by the sea where I crunched numbers every day.

I, of course, did not know that it was an Imperial Eagle or that it was even an eagle and had dismissed it at first glance as a kite. Then the weekday encounters started. Slowly, I realized such eyes could not belong to a scavenger. I could have called The Hong Kong Birdwatching Society but googled it instead.

I started watching the bird carefully as it flew past—its yellow feet, amber eyes, the splotches of cream on the tips, the hard brown of its body. The way the bird’s wings moved—the swoop and the sway—its hunter’s curvature, captivated. Insulated in a glass box, the quiet sea excluded tactically, I slowly came to know an Imperial Eagle.

“Endangered?” a colleague probed politely by the window, stopping for a short break.

“Vulnerable.”

“And what about you?” He was intrigued and smiled with the uncertainty of someone who realized a line had been crossed. 

 I looked away.

“Yes, me too,” I conceded, and walked away. Not really a parting shot, cannot be. Not when lives are laid bare in connecting aisles, in savories stored surreptitiously, in unrinsed cups and orderly cubicles.

The raptor’s ten o’clock visits had at first amazed my colleagues. Now, they were tolerant. Most of them.

Dusk would usually have fallen by the time I boarded the bus home. I got off at my stop and walked, sometimes for hours. One day, as I pushed open the door to my flat and looked down, I saw a pool of water growing, shimmering in the soupy darkness. When I raised my arm to flick the switch on, it brushed against my left breast. The dampness told me I was sodden and I did not even realize it. A storm raged through that night. Afterwards, a fever-tinged, tearing cough kept me in bed for days. I started keeping an umbrella in my tote, just in case.

Food was usually easy. I was fastidious and cooked at home the days I didn’t forget to eat.

“But hunger is impossible to ignore,” my mother said incredulously over the phone. “It is,” I would tell her, my eyes hardening. Fumbling on the bureau, I would excavate an unpaid bill.

From my fridge, I often dug out relics, long past their sell-by date. Its interior gleamed. The freezer section too. Sometimes, in a moment of alarm, I would turn on a faucet and be happy to see the water flowing. On such days, I sorted the mail, paid my bills, jotted down points about my finances. But never answered the phone. Never.

My sister arrived one day, unannounced. I found her reading a book, her backpack on a step at her feet, perched on the landing. A neighbor’s late-afternoon washing hung on the overhead rails, fluorescent rays from a tube on the wall picking out individual drops as they landed plat, plat on the cement. The drops joined to stream around my sister’s feet and left a dark, meandering stain on the gray floor. I opened the door across the landing without a word. She looked up and smiled and cooked me the best pasta I’d ever had after our tears had dried.

“An Imperial Eagle in October is possible,” nodded Kim confidently. The blue strobes overhead streaked her hair an improbable orange. I rubbed my eyes, looked away, sipped my drink.

It was not easy making conversation about a bird in a Wan Chai bar where weary strangers mostly looked for ersatz comfort, swimming up occasionally from deep pools of loneliness to breathe in stale sweat, unlistened melodies, and the fug of anticipatory disappointment.

“You think so?” My fingers found her knee—round as a pebble, sturdy. I had picked the bar stool next to this well-dressed woman because when she kept running a hand through her hair, she didn’t seem so self-assured. Her eyes smiled, a little eagerly, and I stopped trying hard.

Kim leaned across and rapped the bar top lightly with her knuckles. “My father was a birdwatcher.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

At my place, things were easy.

I ordered a pizza first—not the one with pineapples, the one Leila loved. The drinks were unsatisfactory at the bar, and we were hungry by the time we tackled the stairs to my third-floor walk-up.

I woke up when it was still dark. Kim was stretched across the bed, her ebony limbs shiny, satisfying in the blueish glow seeping through the blinds. I had this great urge to delve into her clutch glittering on the floor, dig out her Hong Kong identity card and confirm that she was indeed Kim. Sometime of Barbados, then of the UK, and now, like a sea meets every point it must, of Hong Kong.

Kim was the first I had picked up since Leila.

She was still sleeping on my bed when the door clicked shut behind me. I did a few stretches right on the landing, teetering this way and that, under the perpetual canopy of my neighbor’s laundry.

Near Admiralty, the tents were still pitched. A hard, clear day was dawning. I could feel the burn in my calves, a little lighter. The smell of the sea abruptly assailed me from nowhere. I halted mid-stride—saw Leila jogging ahead. Shook my head and stared harder—a Leila lookalike, maybe. The woman put more distance between us. And then I sensed a quiet shift in the currents, a sudden sucking in of the air, a vibration that was imminent. I looked up and there it was—swooping and banking, motionless in the sky and then, once again, a smear.

The cramps were spaced, the muscles pulling after months of having stayed mothballed. At home, Kim was gone. I slumped against the bathroom door, waiting for a scarlet pool to drown me. Then tentatively touched the folds of my skin under which a fetus had been growing only months ago. In the bathroom, the bathtub was pristine—not the remembered scene of a certain massacre. Sitting on the hard floor, my cells replayed my fatal flip on the slippery surface of porcelain that had extinguished the life inside me. I tried to picture Leila pouring liquid soap liberally into the damp tub. I could see her bend down, ease greasy lumps with a big toe, and reach over to turn the geyser on, calling out to me, “Come on. I’m done.”

Leila never made a proper confession, though. In fact, she chose not to be home the day they discharged me. Dr. Wong was solicitous. “You are so young, try again.”

But I had tried only after talking it over with Leila. We were together for almost two years. “I understand perfectly,” she had nodded, clutching a leaflet with pictures of happy babies I had handed her. Her liquid brown eyes were on me as I said I would seek the favor from my male friends.

“Sure, what are friends for?”

“Say it if you don’t like the idea.”

“I do, I do,” Leila had nodded sagely. Had accompanied me to the first ultrasound, reminded me to take the pills, the good ones.

“For the baby,” she had smiled.

“For the baby,” I had giggled, pulling her close. Smelling her freshly washed hair, her scalp smelling of rosemary, whispering, urgently, “Rosemary . . . rosemary . . .” among other things. Silly things, nothings.

So, when I called her a murderer, a tortuous week after my miscarriage, grief finally burning away my sheath of temperance, she hung her head, thought for a while. Then fished out a bulging backpack from a place that only heartbreaks could open up and was gone. Skipping steps on the stairs, leaning slightly left.

Leila had never liked the walk-up much.   

A few days later, I went back to work.

I found myself in Aberdeen, shiny binoculars in hand, six days after the ten o’clock visits stopped. Mr. Li from Maintenance at my office meant to cross the road and stopped to chat.

“Why here on a Sunday? Missing the office?” he grinned.

“Just looking.” I tentatively fingered the binocular strap. “For birds.”

“Go to Tin Shui Wai. Have you been there? Lovely wetland. Birds come to Hong Kong from all over the world in winter.”

“Do eagles?”

“They must. Check out Po Toi. Many enthusiasts go that way during the migratory months.” Mr. Li gave a wave and went on his way.

I met Kim again that evening. Brought her home. “You are birdlike—small-boned, curious.” She flicked her ebony hand. “The feathers are missing.” Her laughter boomed in the tiny room.

I missed the eagle on Monday. On Tuesday, too. By Wednesday, my colleagues had started noticing.

“Have you been to the country parks?” Myra—her looks so striking she could easily choose to look through people—asked in the toilet, rubbing the slanted mouth of a tube of balm on her lips.

“If you have proper walking shoes, the mornings can be a treat,” Yue suggested gently at the bus stop after work. “My kids had been on a bird-watching trip from the school and now they have a scrapbook going.”

“Really?” I was incredulous. Did children still have scrapbooks? What did I use to put in mine? Need to call Mum, I thought as I pictured the cellophane-covered blue book tucked carefully away somewhere in my childhood bookcase. Must go home soon, I told myself, thinking about the blue book and other mementos preserved by my mother in her tiny flat. Very soon.

I spent way more on the trainers than I thought I should. Do I need a waterproof pair? I debated near the outdoor gear shop, nudged this way and that by a heaving Mong Kok crowd.

That night, I cooked myself pasta—studded with vegetables and redolent of cheese. “The aroma should hit you by now,” I told my sister over the phone, already spooning the next mouthful.

Next day, as the sun glazed the surface of Lippo Center, I stopped jogging. Dug in my heels and looked up—a dark smear was expanding over the multicolored tents. My senses sharp, I waited for the lull. Then my shoulders slumped—it was a common kite, Hong Kong’s trusted scavenger. By noon at work, the bile was burning my throat. I thought of the pasta sitting in the fridge and retched in the antiseptic communal toilet.

The South China Sea glittered ruthlessly outside the glass wall.

The weekend pier was not so desolate. Tourists abounded—their cameras shiny like mine, their trainers soiled. There was a group with binoculars and an easy, dissolute camaraderie. A patient man seemed to be herding them. A woman nodded at me, her eyes on my binoculars. Her partner looked my way too.

“Po Toi,” the man peered inquiringly.

I nodded.

“Join us please. Alex, mind another?” he called out to the patient man who jogged over to check my ticket.

The ferry chugged out at 8:15 on the dot. People munched on sandwiches, apples were offered liberally.

“Have one.” I found the ticket checker next to me, relaxed, smiling, holding out a red fruit. The breeze lifted strands of his hair, tugged at his sleeves. Someone laughed and demanded a beer. Fishermen in a passing boat swore loudly; gulls screeched. The tourists looked on, their cameras idle, waiting for the dent in time when moments became memorable.

I bit into the apple.