Imagine him surging forth from the red earth, beside bamboo rhizomes, flooded paddy fields, and the leaves of plantain trees, as a sylvan creature, little, hardy, and sly, who retains a bird’s soaring majesty and pride. His skin is tough and sensitive, like the trunk of a coconut tree, what flows through him as just as heady as its water, that intoxicating palmful that knows how to make a farmer’s body fall in tune with the fields. The man-bird is, at once, toughness, softness, and dizziness. The earth, their air and their dazzling encounter. He is named Bidyut, lightning in Bengali. Don’t be taken in by his calmness, as discreet as it is lofty. Still, he has something of the owl about him: it is almost as if one perceives a cloak of feathers protecting him from the disturbances of the world, yet what intensity lies within! He listens; eyes open wide, to the echoing of the chants of the forest in his interior night, vivid and variegated. And if he jolts alive, the force of a thunderclap rolls off his soul like a drum. His fleshly fingers set about to tease out, arrange, dramatize a universe, for which, one perceives that bird is using his hands so it can perform as conductor of the orchestra. His score, nature; his instruments, artisans. Together, today, they build nests for men.
Our conductor is equally enchanted with birdsong as he is with the work of his other fellow kind, masons, carpenters, ironsmiths; each with their singular way of developing their art, of listening to the earth’s exigencies and possibilities. As he sees them, he feels the harmony that envelopes them re-form within him; the rippling organicity which links them to one another. Alongside them, bit by little bit, he first constructed his own nest, and it grew and evolved with him, with the nature surrounding him, in a ceaseless, attentive, rhythmic conversation. If the wind shifted a wall, Bidyut made another, sometimes around a tree, to unfold on the landscape; or around an anthill, so as to not disturb its residents. Further away, promoters manhandle the space, planting down boxes to live in, boxes with rigid surfaces and unfeeling skins. For Bidyut, the walls must resonate from their pores with the life that surrounds them, and those who live within. So he polishes them with a mixture of cow dung and straw, in long, tranquil half-moon strokes, until they are a shimmering, lively iridescence; so characteristic of the wall-faces of some villages in Jharkhand. He perforates them with a number of air holes, like the notes he might have placed on a stave line, if he didn't already know to breathe music into clay.
Here, he arranges beams of mud into an organic, resplendent chapel; there, a webbed roof, in a monumental, spiralling wave.
One fine morning, we took him for an architect.
What would we ask of him?
- Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, and a garden.
It is understood; utility would be the constraint and the rule. Bidyut accepts these demands. So long as we understand that a room, a column, a beam or a sink are, first and foremost, part of nature; that they must find their place amid the greater arrangement of the living, like colours on the canvas of the world.
For our bird-orchestral-conductor sees this world, first of all, as a painter.
Before building nests, he spent many long years, under the tutelage of KG Subramanyam, without pencils or brushes, confecting and creating cut-out forms, black-on-white, white-on-black; ceaselessly in search of the simplest, sparest expression, to catch the rhythm, the proportions of life as it cast its impression on him; to comprehend the instrument that was his body; and the vigorous, graceful music resounding within. As light-headed as a vegetable just beginning to emerge; a cloud twisting into itself; the yellow, red and green which dance upon and constitute the invisible. Bidyut, one day, became a painter. He then knew how to shape matter and volume, according to their constraints and possibilities, as all artisans do.
Like a painter, he now constructs perches anchored to the ground, enchanted hideaways, monuments of delicacy "But he would create only what his own fantasy dictates, or else one might just as well go and consult an architect.
An increasing number today, from Hyderabad to the border of Nepal, from West Bengal to Andalusia, offer him the rare and precious liberty he demands. For they know, possibly, that the eccentricities of this indomitable soul would always remain faithful to the attentive humility of a farmer towards the nature around him. Like a bird composing its nest of herbs and branches that surrounds it, the peasant, who has basic means, gathers up the earth and water, bamboo, wood and leaves. Bidyut admires and respects this countryside art; he holds its up and enshrines it, like a pile of clay placed on a pedestal of stone. He gives it space and time, pleasing variety, and ends up fervently polishing it, like the first jewellers might have polished the most modest of pebbles.
Thus a house is born, and lives, and dies, like every other living organism. It will live for the time that her inhabitants know how to live in consonance with nature; or infuse it with a sensibility that's responsive, alert. As they would have learned, from Bidyut, that harmony is a quest; the oeuvre in vital, dynamic action, making itself forever new.
Photo Credits © Miraclette
Text published in "Of human nests", by Bidyut Kumar Roy
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