It was in the mid-eighties of the last century that I was put up in one of the family quarters at an Air Force station in UP. During the dead winter every year I would be standing in the courtyard skirting the veranda and having my breakfast rather than sitting and shivering in the dining room since I had learnt from some of my friends in the north that in the standing position outside the room or hall one would feel less nippy than in the sedentary posture within the four walls.
That day as I started having my breakfast, a crow from somewhere around came cawing and perched on the compound wall close to where I was standing. Soon I took a couple of steps towards the wall and placed on it a handful of what I was eating as the crow hopped sidewise. No sooner had I retreated from near the wall, than the crow came close and finished scoffing the stuff at a quick pace. As days rolled by, the distance the bird moved from the spot where I was usually placing the stuff on the wall for it to eat tailed off. In course of time sharing my breakfast with the bird every day at about 6 A.M. became my ritual. A few weeks later the jet black avian began consuming its share of my breakfast stirring not a bit from the spot, a rare sight that startled me no end with wonder.
On Sundays and holidays when as a slugabed I used to be sleeping in till late in the morning my son, Suresh would mount his cycle to a nearby teashop, return home with a loaf of bread and place a few slices of it in the courtyard for the bird to eat.
It was a manic Monday morning when I was standing in the courtyard as usual and relishing a plateful of steaming hot idlis washed down with scrumptious Sambar, the same crow came and landed at its usual spot on the wall and started cawing as if to remind me not to forget sharing the stuff with it. Jeez! Believe it or not, as I was stretching my hand with a few bits of idli in it so as to place them on the wall the crow, cocking its tiny head intrepidly started eating the stuff directly from my palm by gobbling the bits with the sides of its hard beak rather than pecking at it as usual with the bent tip of it. A crow feeding directly from the hands of a human is indeed a bizarre sight to behold. Everyone in my family stood around, almost skipping a breath watching the jaw-dropping sight of a crow eating directly from my palm.
Thus I succeeded in living out what had been in my imagination for long——-that of letting a corvine species feeding direct from my hands. Notwithstanding the incidents when crows were repeatedly pecking on my pate on a few occasions I made a bash at feeding one of them straight from my hand.
The experience taught me that some of the avian species like the domestic animals long eagerly for the love and affection from us, the humans.
