I am a Crow. My name is Bob. But the grand old lady calls me Baba.

We , birds also tire of flying sometimes and we land on the nearest safest perch. And we get to see so much happening around us , some of which we don’t understand.

My friend is also a bird. “My name is Ramu and I am a parrot” , he first introduced himself ! I felt lost , what was he saying ? He kept mouthing more gibberish and I looked away because it seemed like he was showing off ! After a bit , he returned to our bird language and we trotted along together , Ramu in his cage and me on the outside. Every time  we met , the first few lines would be what he had learnt the previous day and when he ran out of words in that strange language , he would slip back into our tiny world. We crows are an intelligent breed you see , birds with a brain , so I started recognising some words. I learnt some , but I am not a parrot , I cannot mimic even , let alone speak ! So I learnt that Ajay who is always moving around in that house is a man and Amma who never leaves her chair is a woman. And I watched how Ajay painstakingly taught Ramu new words everyday. They even had a conversation , it sounded so nice , I wanted to do so too with my family and friends around me , living in neighbouring trees. We get together several times in a day. We have so much to share in a language of our own.

So yesterday , after flying around for a while , I perched myself on the wall of some place , don’t know what it’s called and saw one man distributing food to many. We recognise food anywhere and I flew in there too , but they shooed me away. I went back to my perch. Suddenly they were all flying at each other in anger , trying to grab more food than was being given. I was stunned , nevertheless took my chance of trying to peck at the food that had been strewn on the floor , but they shooed me away again. I felt sad and flew away to another place and thought of the scene every morning , when The Man Ajay feeds us with crumbs of bread and sometimes some very tasty stuff.

It has become a habit now. We have a way of sensing time , we crows. My fellow crows and me wait on the branches of the trees or we fly around till we see him step out of the house with food in his hand. He pieces food into bits and lays them on the wall of the compound , looking around for us. I am sure he can’t recognise us one from the other , we all look the same. The one closest to the food swoops down and takes his pick or two and moves away. We take turns to land on the wall , sometimes waiting at a distance till our friend ahead of us is done. Sometimes , some of us don’t get any at all , its alright , we don’t fly at each other , we go looking for food elsewhere and when we do find some we caw out to our family and friends to come and share it with us. Period !

mythoughtlane :  The ‘food to the crows’ scene is not imaginary , I witness this every morning in my neighbourhood , amazed and left wondering at the same time.