Here in this part of Delhi, I look at crows long enough. I am beginning to recognize each one of them—some have an oval head, some have a little-flattened-oval head, some have a cloudy-gray throat, some have a rich iron-black crown. Some, when stretched out in a white bland May sky, emerge with a slit-like V in their wings. Some swoosh on my walks but then swiftly turn in another direction (perhaps some can even smell coconut oil in my hair).
After drinking water, crows wipe their beaks by perching on a Dish TV antenna, some on a bare-branched Mango tree, and some on a parapet wall. Invariably, they all make sounds other than caw caw caw.
When I see crows, my senses sharpen.
It is said that crows retain memories of human faces. I wonder about this possibility of being recognized while not giving up my thrill of becoming familiar with nature. This familiarity borders on an internal construct of “having known.” It is something I have associated with the routine of taking evening walks with my parents—my mother directing me toward crows foraging near mulching leaves of deciduous trees; my father spotting a peacock in the darkened and laden skies of November. During the initial morning routine of fetching coconut water from the nearest Safal outlet, my mother would inadvertently be the first to notice young children walking to their schools. I would always ask her to slow down the car even though she had already stepped on the brakes. But still I say. I take the baton from her as these scenes stick to me. I continue the marathon of recognizing—in this marathon, a kind of familiarity that handholds the mundane but is also fleeting.
When June evenings spread like a yellow of Amul butter on golden-brown toasts and an intense sun partners with white clouds, summer months become unpredictable. The weather doesn’t disclose much of its plans to seasons. Crows on my boundary wall, here, prefer flying close to my mother rather than me. Even though it is I who has been dropping rice and roti into an earthen bowl, my crows feel more comfortable around my mother. Perhaps I am confusing proximity with familiarity or comfort. In any case, I am happy that it is my mother who gets the attention; the familiarity. I like the crows hovering around her; they recognize human faces but also some other things. Things which are difficult to register, like daily effort.
I believe that crows are able to sense something deeper about the city too. They might not be able to read the JCBs parade on Delhi roads after midnight. But they do watch the water sprays that come out in the morning to settle the dust after workers dismantle buildings and add another renovation to the Central Vista of Delhi.
There is one crow who has made a nest on a Mango tree opposite the bare-branched one. I see it from my window, with beak half-open, when I am dropping off roti—this crow, who is always the first to arrive as if reserving a seat; this crow who is now hopping closer to me than others; this crow who inspects Delhi Police’s yellow barricades with much alacrity; this crow, who accompanies my oily hair interface and wind on cyclone landing days of April, May, and June; this crow who bullies mynahs; this crow, who I have not yet completely understood; this crow, who is now becoming a vessel for all my memories related to crows—this crow is building a nest.
I have actively dropped food for birds for four years now—filling water bowls, searching leftovers, picking out ants from old water, flicking brown leaves from algae-infested water, scratching the green algae from the rim only to see it appear every few days, picking bones brought by raptors out of the water bowl. In the process, many water-holding dishes have gotten lost: Bengali Fast Foods containers, Mother Dairy Dahi cups, Amul ice cream tubs, plastic plates, a small earthen pot, and a middle-size earthen pot. When the dish was kept on the windowsill, crows knocked it over. Sometimes mynahs carried the plastic cup away. When the container was kept on the parapet wall, the wind blew it down. In the case of pots, they broke within a week.
My dedication to dropping food and filling up water has become increasingly tied with not just paying attention to the land but also holding attention. I prefer walking if the distance and traffic allows. On such walks, the earthen pots holding pieces of rotis and browned rice reappear near traffic lights. In winters, when the bowls reappear near community parks, the green foliage of the unmanicured parks is mixed with the multicolored sweaters, dark blue jackets, white sheets, all spread out on low shrubs of bare bougainvilleas and short banana plants in the sun as people from nearby colonies shell peanuts and play cricket. As I walk further, the rotis and pulses are sprawled out on pavements in places where gardens and parks are razed to make way for a busy avenue, reducing landmarks to a traffic island.
Someone else is paying attention to the birds, who are not really dependent on their act.
For the first few months, I believed none of the birds would be able to see the water bowl if I kept it down on the ground. It had to be up, above and at the center. I would have even conjured a board in the middle of nowhere, just to keep that bowl.
But the relationship of these birds with water, parks or me, doesn’t work that way. They are a species who realized that the mango tree alongside the boundary wall was dying much before I did.
One day, after seeing me worried and lost (because a tree was being pruned), a gardener remarked that the bare-branched mango tree was “gone” (Yeh toh gaya). He might have been right. Far less murder of crows used to visit it. A huge money plant was swiftly winding around the thick trunk of the tree and was almost parallel to the streetlights. Parrots continued to live in the hole that the woodpecker had created some summers back, and mynahs never sat on the tree for more than a minute.
There is a way in which the world deposits around these gone trees and we don’t get to know. Trees get cut and not an indoor plant alerts us. Trees, do they ever come to know how we are feeling? New saplings turn up in our yard and we step on them to take an Uber or close the window to begin Zoom meetings. Do we ever come to know what is happening near those roots?
I thought maybe by walking, selecting appropriate dishes for the birds, remembering to change water every day, pointing at birds and then drawing a line in midair to the water bowl, watching gone trees who were not yet gone, I was forming a connection with the birds and the land. Like a tree. Like I would know which crow has been drinking water if I practiced watching them enough times. Like I would know which mynah visited us yesterday just by the tap of their feet in the water bowl if I spent time remembering what they did every day.
The crow with its open beak has been making a nest. The story goes that one evening, the half-open-beaked crow found our new broom on the terrace. We had kept it out in the sun to dry the newness. As soon as I walked off the terrace, the crow was in the middle of the terrace, busy plucking seekh from jhaadu, such that my re-arrival went unflapped by its wings. The crow did not budge. On being hushed to fly away, the crow went to another corner and waited for me to depart.
When I didn’t budge either, the crow made a detour to the corner of the terrace in order to start inspecting other jhaadus of my neighbors. During that week, the crow was seen carrying pieces of thermocol, dried-fallen-off leaves, tattered pink-white bus tickets, shreds of MTNL bills, cotton bolls which once floated in April air; all the possibilities of the universe familiarizing a home in that half-open beak. Crows rushed in and rushed out.
In this part of New Delhi, crows summon us to stop and look at them. In this part of New Delhi, just kilometers away from all the digging up and renovation and redevelopment being done for a new parliament and office buildings. In this part of New Delhi, which has been listening to all the trucks and trolleys being pulled for the Pragati Maidan corridor.
Some years ago, Baker, Lutyens, Hardinge, and Irving arrived. They were looking for appropriate tracks to transform Delhi (once again) and design a New Delhi. They saw black bucks, baboons, monkeys, jackals, hare, and porcupines here, in this part of New Delhi. Much of the space north, south, and east of Shahjahanabad was wild and rugged. But on such terraces, where crows carry bills of yesteryear to make their home, what exactly are we seeing? Are we only seeing crows? Are we billing someone for having homes on trees?
It is not that I am really recognizing each of the crows in my colony. I am recognizing each and every piece of space that these crows are inhabiting. It is not the sound of their caw that I am memorizing but the intensity with which they call out that is being registered here, from the crown of these trees and public space on these roads.
Tomorrow, a different flock of crows from Chamba may fly in and sit on the mango tree. I will still recognize their minute movement. I will still register a crow’s rattle, a whole range of voices when the crow is plunged in deep cleaning itself. It is not the crows that I am seeing. It is a space, a sharing of too many movements with a space, that comes alive with crows.
Crows remember the bills of such Delhi. Carried half-clutched in their beaks, outlined in red-green-yellow, softened by water kept on rooftops, these parchments are dried by the monsoon wind from oceans. On such boundaries of cream-yellow houses, these MTNL bills stop by and listen to barricades becoming a constant on Margs. On such crowns of mango trees, these bills pat the last genome of trees that will not be sequenced or preserved; familiarity is not afforded by museums. No replantation drives for such proximity.
Around such blue skies of Delhi, crows remember Ahmed Ali’s description of Dilli and perhaps don’t offer a caw caw caw. They mix their wings’ upbeat swipe with koel’s delight and go on. Challenging ubiquitous green direction boards with a white outline of “Welcome to NDMC Area,” crows fly with a constant acceleration and talk about Andaman’s deep fissures with NH-3 flyovers. Then, taking on such parchments from Delhi, crows relax their bowel movements.
I like to believe crows are the only artists in the world who write with dust and continuity of being present. They herald a kind of past when flying to mango trees. The future is a sprinkle of shine on their wings. They keep picking bugs from under their feathers, and they keep their head ruffled when it rains. All day they work out MCQs on NSEW directions. They marigold for the winter in the north. They see forts and breathe the Very Poisonous levels of smog when the city locks in a lockdown. They drink water.
What could I have possibly learned about crows or this place? In the very short span of time that I have observed crows, it is like pressing one single letter on the keyboard. This in the larger scheme of things, or so to say the geological twenty-four-hour clock is nothing. Afterall, humans only arrived in the last second of it. I am not competing with that twenty-four-hour clock or the 365-day analogy that compresses a unique life into a timescale made to control and project an indelible mark left by my species. A mark that does not evoke any sense of joy or pride in me.
When crows dissolve the white bread that they carry from my neighborhood from the water bowl I keep, mynahs don’t bother with the mess created. Crows pick and flick while other birds go from plant to plant kept in pots to look for grains and insects. Crows fist with pieces of roti leaping on the edges of cream-yellow houses. They fly into the garden downstairs and bind all these particles together. I feel like crows stretch time.
Maybe crows dissolve uncertainties too.
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Rumpus Original artwork by Cyrus Finegan
