Short Story: Part1

It was raining heavily, when I first saw Kalu perched on the top of the pelmet. He was completely drenched in rain and had sought refuge inside my room. Thereafter, I would often seem him making sorties here and there, in the open air. Time and again, we would find ourselves giving curious glances to each other, I standing in my balcony, and he perched on the palm tree. He was somewhat different from the other crows. May he found me different too from other human beings.

I never saw him in the company of his own flock. But yes, he was fond of Rinki, the small baby who would drop more than she would eat. Whenever Kalu saw Rinki on the bench, he would instinctively know that it was party time. But party time was cut short when Kalu accidentally went too near to Rinki, and Rinki caught hold of him by his neck. Kalu cried with all his might but the baby was not ready to relent till her parents came screaming out wrongly thinking that the baby was in trouble.

After this incident, Kalu decided to play safe and so did the parents. So, whenever they took their baby out, they would make sure that Kalu was not in sight. And if they found him sitting on the palm tree, which happened to stand next to the benches, they would shoo him away. This left a bad taste in Kalu’s mouth. He developed a general aversion for human beings, which meant that I also got typecast, and we started seeing less of each other as the days passed. But yes surely, he never moved out from his palm tree house.

Though I won’t often see him, but whenever I got a chance, I would find him sitting listless on the branches. Sometimes he got restless too. He would be pecking his beak hard on the palm tree branches, as if angry. He was now a grown up.

One Sunday afternoon, from the window of my balcony, I saw another crow sitting on the palm tree. It was looking noticeably diminished in size and so I assumed it must have been the female species of Kalus’s clan. It looked as if she had decided to take some rest before continuing her journey. Curiously, I started to look for Kalu. He was nowhere to be seen. He would have been delighted to find someone like her, on the palm tree branches. As I decided to withdraw from the scene, I saw Kalu sitting on the window sill of the opposite building. He was looking intentively at this new visitor. He looked visibly excited too by the way he was hopping all over the window sill.