The Bat and the Stealth Bomber

Beauty.  Air.  Death.

I got back from work, with a heavy heart. A small boy had called 'bondhu...' (friend) after me as I walked back - often this is accompanied by an ask of money, so I just walked on.  But no ask came.  Either way, his small, skinny, frame and large brown eyes disappeared from my view, leaving the lingering traces of my privilege resonating inside me. The chance encounter of two with such vastly different opportunities in the world.

I cooked a quick dinner of noodles with tomato and gourd, and headed with it up a flight of stairs to the roof, a favourite place of mine.  Curiously no other foreigner comes up here (despite myself continually extolling the wonders of the place).  I settled down to eat, under a cloudy sky which faintly trembled with the beginning of a cool change, the cautious wind picking up gently around me.  Having finished, I stood up and walked over to the ledge to look down.  Almost immediately a dark flapping figure drifted through my line of vision.  A bat!  It's a flying webbed thing, I caught a good glimpse of the membranous black wings flapping through the air, just as a spider walks across the earth.  That is, it was having a conversation with the air, (or the ground), instead of a monologue which birds are want to do.  My mouth remained in a firmly embarrassing 'O' shape as my head swiveled to follow the disappearing creature. 

It was awe-ful, in the proper sense of the word.  I had a flashback to a moment when as a young teenage boy, I begged my parents to go the Avalon airshow, where myself and thousands of others formed similar 'O's as they craned their heads to see fighter jets roaring through the sky.  This kind of awe seems elemental, perhaps.  However the more I thought about it, the more I realised that mostly our awe of a flying creature is directed to military technology, machines carefully and painstakingly designed to kill and destroy.  Our collective fascination with the advanced cruise missile, the stealth bomber, the unmanned drone, each the distillation of billions of years of evolved creativity, directed not to life, but to death. 

The bat flew back and forth a few times, indecisively trying to find a suitable tree to settle into. Each time the feeling of awe was in my belly as I saw this seeing this great creature fly by.   This time I was relieved that I cast my lot with life.