“I know the sound of the turtledove very well.”

“I had kept pigeons in the Erman Apartment between 1977 and 1978. My grandfather, Halil İbrahim Yamak, had bought the pigeons. Later on, I had also kept pigeons in the garden of our two‑storey house with a garden on Sakızagacı Street No. 11. After the year 2023, I heard a turtledove making a sound like ‘mehtee… mehteee’ and I was surprised. I learned that in North India this expression means ‘elder uncle’ and that they use different terms such as elder uncle and younger uncle for uncles. My aunt Oya (Oya Yamak) always puts water in the garden for them. (In the past, when my grandfather became ill in the 2000s, he had kept many turtledoves.) I looked at a Japanese ‘Grand Shaolin’ photograph on the computer, then went down to the garden. In 2023, while I was sitting on the garden swing, that same image was right in front of me again; I looked at it and then went down from the second floor to the garden. I was wearing loose black Japanese-style trousers, a hakama.”