For 20 years, two brothers living in the dirty neighborhood of Wazirabad in India’s capital, Delhi, have been treating wounded black kites (鸢) that fall from the city’s skies.
Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad rescue birds of prey — mostly injured by paper kite strings — and carry them to a basement garage at home. Here, they begin nursing them to health: cleaning and bandaging wounds, fixing wings and broken bones.
Small miracles happen in the basement. Here lives are saved, a living is made and there’s some happiness too. “You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics,” say the brothers. “Life itself is relationship. That’s why we can’t abandon the birds.”
The brothers talk about how a neighborhood bird hospital refused to treat the first kite they rescued because it was a “non-vegetarian bird”. At that time, they, were teenage bodybuilders and that’s how they “came to know about flesh and muscles”. They figured out ways to bandage the kites. They became passionate about birds. “We’d lie on the ground, watching the elegant flights in the sky,” they say. “The head would spin. Have you ever felt dizzy looking into the sky?”
The street outside the brothers’ home becomes a smelly pool of sewage water which comes into the basement during the rainy season. Pigs wander in a muddy channel. Air quality reaches dangerous peaks. Yet there’s life and hope. Monkeys climb playfully over some electric wires that hang unsteadily over narrow streets. An airplane in the sky is reflected in a pool of quiet water.
When the weather clears, skies are filled with paper kites. And then the birds begin dropping, and the brothers are back at their job. Sometimes the birds fall after bumping against buildings in the smog or getting entangled (缠住) in overhead wires. At one point, there were more than 100 wounded birds in the basement. The brothers once swam across the river to rescue a bird with a broken wing.
【小题1】Why do the brothers treat wounded kites?| A．They believe they are interconnected. | B．They like to see miracles happen. |
| C．They are deeply religious people. | D．They do it for political reasons. |
| A．Kites are not protected birds. | B．Kites feed on other creatures. |
| C．Kites keep their heads spinning. | D．Kites are dangerous to human beings. |
| A．By listing some statistics. | B．By depicting a miserable scene. |
| C．By making an analysis. | D．By making comparisons. |
| A．Look at the positive side of a thing. | B．Start a great cause with small deeds. |
| C．Live in harmony with creatures around. | D．Lend a helping hand to people in need. |
