Why do birds suddenly appear?

I have nothing to write about now a days because life is comfortably settled, therefore I will write about bird chasing.

Our office is actually a house, specifically the Mohajer’s house before they moved into their current house. And now it’s our office. In our office there is a section where instead of ceiling there is a metal grate. When it rains the rain comes in, but the floor under the grate is depressed so the water can’t get into the rest of the house and flows down two drains. There is probably some very practical Indian reason why one would build a house like this. Usually we keep the grate covered with a sheet held down by bricks, but in one of the latest monsoons it blew off the grate and a bunch birds got into the office. As I write this there is one bird sitting on the fluorescent light tube behind me. Another is somewhere near Sohayl and they’re both squawking and warbling. I put the sheet back over the grate, but it’s so old and torn that they seem to get in through the holes in it. If life were an Alfred Hitchcock film, you would not want to live in this building.

Rohit and I have a method. There’s an empty bedroom raised about half a story over a tiny garage. In this room there’s a screen door, which leads to nowhere but a cement railing and then a drop, but it’s good for ventilation in the hot little room. I open this screen and then Rohit and I run around the house clapping and herding the birds to the room over the garage. Then I dash in, close the door behind me and clap the bird out of the screen door.

I haven’t had to do this for months, probably because of the monsoons but it looks like its bird chasing season again. Today the reason why I do this was brought home when one of the birds flew into the fan and was killed, blood pooling beneath the little thing.