My secret life with crows

“Was all of this always there? These crows, this light, this theatre?”

Sneha Mehta finds herself irresistibly drawn to the crows outside her window. Absorbed in their antics she relearns the squandered art of paying attention. 

Illustrated for Soup by Parmita Mukherjee

In isolation, I began watching crows.

The circumstances for this curious aberration are as follows. For fourteen days after my return to Bombay from New York, I was confined to my room. Like other foreign-returned, potential virus-carriers, I couldn’t move around the house, let alone outdoors, and I ate meals delivered on a tray. “Won’t you get bored?” people wondered, to whom fourteen days seemed like an unbearable eternity. This was early enough in the wake of the crisis that it indeed felt like an inconvenient imposition, not a fact of our new reality.

I went straight from the airport into this room, and there I stayed. My entire world was reduced to what was visible outside the windows of the ground-floor flat I was born into. Through the white, geometric, Art Deco-grills I could see our small garden, its familiar grass carpet ravaged by the harsh Bombay sun, and coconut tree trunks hugged by dense bunches of philodendron. An anomaly amongst the typical Bombay public space taxonomy of concrete and car parking, this garden has not changed in the twenty-six years I’ve lived in this house on and off. I had grown used to glancing at it without giving it a second thought.

But in isolation, with nothing urgent to say or do, nowhere to go and no one to be, I looked outside. Really looked. And I discovered that with all the humans cooped up indoors, a new cast of characters had taken over: against this unchanging landscape were thrilling scenes acted out by the humble House Crow, the avian fixture of life in Bombay.

I quickly settled into a quarantine routine. Jet-lagged, I’d wake up early (too early), sit in my chair and just look out the window, waiting for the show to begin.

Living on the ground floor surrounded by this garden feels a little like living under a thick rainforest canopy, a world of soft shadows pierced by streaks of bright light. I could see the dark shapes of the crows, stark against this green backdrop. I’d watch them hop across branches, evaluating each one for comfort. I’d watch them strut across the grass, balancing comically large pieces of twigs in their beaks, and I’d wonder if they were building nests someplace nice. A coconut would fall, hitting the ground with a hollow thump, and I’d watch them scatter, startled by this pesky interruption.

Sometimes one or two would come and peer at me quizzically before flying off, haughtily showing off their freedom. I’d try to bait them with small pieces of farsan or bread crumbs in the hope that we’d become friends. No luck yet.  Perhaps city crows are used to greater luxuries—a crow visits my friend Himanshi every evening at her home in Pune; she sends him off with a raw egg.

I watch as the garden comes alive in the background as if putting on a botanical ballet—the knotted locks of an ancient banyan swaying majestically and the slender icicles of coconut fronds twinkle-toed and effervescent—to an incredible orchestra of rustling and crowing and chirping.

“Was all of this always there? These crows, this light, this theatre?” I asked myself, as I silently watched the production unfold. Of course, the answer is yes. Growing up, I was often woken up by the groups of crows perched on our windows, all cawing at once and at the top of their voices. They were as present to me as the people in the house. But as I grew older, and my internal life grew noisier, I stopped hearing them and eventually stopped seeing them altogether, save for the occasional glimpse of fluttering black feathers, promptly forgotten. 

It turns out that paying attention is a gift I had squandered, caught up in the frenzied self-absorption of youth. But despite how hermitic isolation felt, I was reminded of this not by a spiritual epiphany, but by crows.

Crows are incredible creatures, known for their intelligence, compassion, and even their spitefulness. Bombay’s crows are particularly charismatic, and Mark Twain made close friendships with the bird during his travels to India in 1896, calling them “The Bird of Birds.”

“I came to know him well, by and by, and be infatuated with him,” he wrote of the crow, in Following the Equator. “In the course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a liar, a thief, a spy…their number is beyond estimate, and their noise is in proportion. I suppose they cost the country more than the government does, yet that is not a light matter. Still, they pay; their company pays; it would sadden the land to take their cheerful voice out of it.” 

On my first day of isolation, I posted a video to Instagram of a crow dragging a branch across the grass, on day two, of one walking across the compound wall like it was a tightrope. Most people responded sympathetically. “Poor you! You must be so bored!” some said. “This feels like something out of a Hitchcock film,” said another. I tried to explain that I wasn’t losing my mind, nor was I developing a perverse obsession with ornithological voyeurism. 

But I can’t explain why these crows were more diverting to me than all the books, movies, and video calls I could have had. Crows aren’t particularly beautiful, and their cawing is annoying at best, but the curious outcome of my isolation was that just by paying attention, I had discovered something wonderful in what I once considered absolutely unremarkable. 

And like an outlandish lucid dream, whose spell would be broken by questioning its plausibility, I simply enjoyed this sight. I liked watching crows, and that was that.

“I really get very elated by again looking, by again seeing that the sky is blue, that the grass is green,” wrote Willem de Kooning, about a series of his paintings inspired by the Neapolitan landscape. 

I read these words in 2016 and I’ve had them on a virtual post-it note ever since. They make more sense to me now than ever before. Every morning of my isolation period, I too was elated to find that the crows were out and about on their furtive exploits, just as they had been the day before and would be the day after.

During an unprecedented global, and personal, upheaval, sameness is precious, and perhaps more importantly, priceless. 

My isolation has long ended and I now have more diverse distractions available to me. But I’m content with my daily meditations with crows. Moreover, I’m soothed and delighted. Perhaps someday I will inevitably get bored with my corvid companions. But I am prepared for that day, because the next thing I want to gawk at, whose apparent lifelessness presents an even more engaging challenge for my imagination, is leaves.

Sneha Mehta is a writer and designer. She is interested in telling stories about how the objects we surround ourselves with shape culture, identity, and our lives. She is based between Bombay and New York.