It was genuinely distressing: a plaintive, almost howling, barking yelp. It was a worried peahen by the side of the road.
I have adopted a habit of walking early in the morning, whilst I am in Dubai, to avoid the heat.
About 5am, I set off and step in a lively fashion from my hotel, on Sheikh Zayed road, past the Metro station and toward the Dubai financial centre.
I go around a huge, wooden-fenced building site, where I am reliably informed that the ‘Museum of the Future’ is being constructed, and I enter a tranquil, calm, almost surreal world of green lawns, water, well-established trees and peacocks.
That’s right! Peacocks!
It is delightful. Truly a privilege to stroll quietly by these lovely, stately fowl.
Many are in the trees and, as it is still quite dark, they cry out: an appallingly loud, hard to ignore wail, as if a small child is in distress.
But just as many, and there are a lot, are ambling around, nearly all accompanied by a little peachick.
I really wanted to call them chick-peas, but ‘she who must be obeyed’ said I was being silly, so I won’t.
They are just gorgeous, and they are so, well, dependent, on mum, the peahen.
As the mum bumbles about, pecking at the ground, a little, mini-me of a peachick jerkily wanders about, never straying more than a metre away from her.
When she turns and wanders in a particular direction, so does junior.
It is as if an invisible cord connects them.
Which is why the sight of a chick-less peahen, yowling, was so awful.
It tears at your heartstrings, I can tell you.
I even recognised the peahen.
She only had two of those weird little spiky things on her head, and I’d named her ‘double trouble’ in my mind, after a couple of weeks of passing her most mornings.
Cars swished by the financial centre a short distance away, buses full of workmen rumbled by, and other peahens, with their little peachicks safely velcroed to their sides, looked on, uncaringly, I thought.
I wanted to help.
I even briefly entertained the notion of thrashing about in the bushes, but rapidly discounted the silly idea.
I stumped past, with a ‘sorry, double trouble’ mumbled out of the corner of my mouth.
The next morning, I approached the green sward, nodded a by now familiar ‘good morning’ to the turbaned security guard and rapidly made my way towards the peacock-populated park.
I could see several silhouetted shapes in the distance; large peahens alongside the little peachicks.
I looked out for double trouble. As I came around the corner, I spied her, near the hedges by the side of the grass, away from the road, almost with her head in the hedge.
‘She’s depressed’, I thought, and made to wander by disconsolately.
Then I saw a little moving bundle by her side.
It was little double trouble! What a relief!
The peachick was back and, to my mind at least, double trouble looked content.
It made my day, I don’t mind telling you.
- Mike Gaunt is a former headmaster at St Christopher’s School, Bahrain
– mikegaunt@gmail.com