Behind my house stands a magnificent guava tree. It is an old, generous giant with a wide, low, and impossibly thick canopy. When it fruits, it bears the sweetest pink-centered guavas I’ve ever tasted.
My neighbor Murali, who lives directly behind us, has never shared my affection for it.
The very day he moved in, I caught him instructing an enthusiastic gardener to hack off a massive branch. I leaned out of my kitchen window, fists clenched through the grill, and shouted at him. “Snakes will come into my house,” he protested.
Thus began our quiet war. Murali, the guava tree murderer.
Every few months, when he thinks I’m away or distracted, he (sometimes with his wife’s help) sneaks in a “pruning.” A branch here, a limb there. Slow, steady sabotage.
But the tree survives, and thrives. In season, it becomes a raucous avian banquet. White-cheeked barbets, red-whiskered bulbuls, sunbirds, and rose-ringed parakeets jostle noisily for the ripest fruit. A greater coucal often patrols the branches like a solemn overseer, making sure no one hogs the feast. I can watch that large, chocolate-brown bird for hours as it bobs from branch to branch.
The most fascinating visitor, however, arrives after dark.
I know him only as Mr. Bat. My bedroom window overlooks the canopy, so I hear him almost every night during the season — the sudden whoosh of air as he descends, followed by the unmistakable creak and rustle of a branch bending under his weight.
One night, Mira and I turned off the lights, gently parted the blinds, and watched him. There he hung upside down, holding a guava in his little hands, crunching away contentedly. In the faint glow, he looked surprisingly endearing — like a puppy with huge, dark, googly eyes. When we accidentally shone the torch on him, he froze. We quickly switched it off, embarrassed at interrupting his midnight feast.
For the next few days, he didn’t come. We worried we had scared him away for good.
Then, one morning, I found a pair of tiny legs sticking straight up from the kitchen grill — a pied bushchat. It must have flown into the wires and died there. Over the following week, the little bird slowly desiccated under the sun and rain, eventually returning to the sky in its own quiet way.
About a week later, we heard the familiar rustle again. Mr. Bat had returned.
Meanwhile, Murali continued his campaign. I often saw him and his wife standing near the tree, eyeing the heavy branches that hung dangerously close to their compound wall. We later discovered their grand plan: to cut down the guava tree and plant papayas in its place.
Last year, I had quit my job and took a full year off. Depending on who you ask, it was either the best or the worst decision of my life.
In that one year, I saved a guava tree, befriended the neighborhood’s feathered rascals, thwarted Murali and his wife’s quiet colonization efforts, and solved the case of the Mysterious Rustle at Midnight.
And these stories, I believe, with some embellishments, will be my rocking-chair tale for the children in my old age.
The Reluctant Book Worm 
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