The Bat and the Manjaa

(Warning - slightly distressing image below)

The other day, as I sat bent over my drawing, I got a frantic call from my mother. She was downstairs trying to stop our fellow colony residents from burning dried leaves under healthy trees (just one of the many tree-loving things she does). ‘Come down at once!’ she said, ‘There is a bat and it is injured.’ Injured, it appeared, by the manjaa thread used for flying kites.

Words like that seem to pierce my soul and fill a strange kind of fear in me. I suddenly become highly receptive, imagining and feeling all sorts of things that might have happened to the poor creature. Armed with a pair of scissors, a clean rag and some water, I rushed down to find the bat lying face down with a badly broken wing. It seems it had been caught in the manjaa hanging from the trees, struggled to get out and become even more entangled. The watchman saw it hanging and tried to get it down, the result of which was it crashing to the ground. It lay there, not moving, a crowd of children around it, but everyone too afraid (perhaps, thankfully) to touch it.

I’m not a vet and we couldn’t have done much. I gave it some water that it frantically tried to drink, and then tried to cut away the manjaa and clean the wound. It was a bad wound with the wing torn and part of the bone sticking out. As I tried cutting the thread away, gingerly so that it would hurt least, it struck me how strong it was. It was almost like wire and the wing was so tightly wrapped up in it, it was impossible to get it out. We decided to bring it upstairs at home to get away from the crowd; the poor thing must have been terrified. As I carried it in my arms, held up by rags and my dupatta, it felt so much like a baby, but one that was far beyond me in the way it was silently suffering. I think that was when it died. Because when we opened the door and lay it down, it wouldn’t move. It didn’t respond to anything. 

Maybe it was trauma of being handled, or the impact of falling from such a height, or that the intensity of the wound had finally triumphed. We will never know. But I do know that a strong piece of string, hanging in a tree and obstructing animals’ natural movement, did not belong there. And even after that, as I tried to get it out of the dead bat’s mangled wound (it just seemed something that needed to be done), it wouldn’t come out.

That manjaa has left a permanent wound on my mind. I think kite flying is a beautiful sport. But I think we have to be more responsible with what we leave behind after we’re done with it. It seems too sad and horrible that a simple thread left innocently behind should be the cause of so much suffering, not just for animals but also other people. No sport is worth that kind of pain.