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In the dead of night sometimes I hear the lapwing calling, “Did he do it? Did he do it?” The plaintive cry often grows hysterical, ending in a series of shrill questions: “Did he? Did he? Did he?”
Sometimes I feel like asking the bird, “Who did what to whom?” But that would only frighten away the little thing, which sports a black bib and a white waistcoat, and struts around on stilted togs too big, under a gibbous moon.
Such questions are better aimed at this newspaper, which arrives every morning under my door with an inviting swish. Then I can indulge my insatiable urge to find out all about who did what to whom, when and where and how.
But would that resolve the enigma of the lapwing? Why does it cry at that unearthly hour? If you asked my mother, she would refer you to the Panchatantra. “Once upon a time, the lapwings laid their eggs in a hollow by the sea, which promptly washed them away during high tide. When their cries, ‘Did he do it?’ brought no response from the sea — which only shivered like a sheet of silver scales under a brooding sky — the birds grew enraged and vowed to empty the ocean in a series of sips. They’ve been trying ever since and they cry because they have still to succeed.”
Poor little lapwing! Medieval Indian tradition uses its allegory to caution against futility. Emptying the ocean with a series of bird-sips belongs to that category of unwise enterprise that includes catching your own shadow.
Although such tasks seem destined for failure, they also seem to be imbued with a hopelessly romantic, Promethean spirit. Which explains why in mythic imagination mere mortals are able to not only drink up the sea but pee it out too: Sage Agastya swallows the originally sweet ocean in one enormous gulp and lets it out as brine. Agastya is also credited with having grounded the mountains by clipping their wings. In humankind’s dream time, mountains used to fly around at will like airborne fortresses from Star Wars. Then came the sage with his knowledge systems and grammar and the rest became history, literally.
The story however takes a sly swipe at conventional knowledge, under whose auspices mountains are ground to dust, and our originally wayward and whimsical natures are made to fit the Procrustean bed of social order and convention. Which is when you need a subversive sage like Bernard Shaw who says, “You see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’” Does that smack of Shavian pamphleteering and demagoguery? Not when freedom of expression, the right to ask ‘impossible’ or disallowed questions and freedom of existence itself, are at stake.
That’s what great papers and grand paupers such as Lao-Tzu would defend to death: Their condemnation of conventional or superficial cleverness does not stem from an attempt to reduce the human mind to a conformist vacuity; rather it originates from an impulse to unshackle our innate and spontaneous intelligence, to enable the swallowing of the universe itself in a series of scoops or takes, day after radiant day.
In such a scheme, the lapwing’s cry is simply a cri de coeur. It throbs with an instinctive spontaneity, calling its mate perhaps for a midnight tryst in the moonlight. I like to think of it as echoing what a southern sage once said: “When you’re up to your waist in alligators, it’s difficult to remind yourself that your initial objective was to drain the swamp (or the sea).
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