Crows : My Angelic Ancestors

The Crow Pair

Wheatfield with Crows ~ Vincent van Gogh (1890)

Crows ~ Nicoletta Ceccoli (2009)

The birds are the messengers from heaven. They fly in order to mediate between the beings on Earth and their guardian angels in the sky. It is possible only for them to soar up into the blue yonder and kiss the stars. Alighting back safely to the embrace of the tree. Their eternal companion and shelter. The wings of the birds are a mystery. It is not through the wings that they are able to fly. The first flap of their wings is a call for the seraph, who would instantly descend from the celestial space. By the next flap, the bird is buoyed up for the flight. All in a wink. It is the seraph who lifts the bird and makes it fly. The flapping of the wings is just an illusion to hoodwink the human eye.   

There is no other bird which can be as intimate to the human being as the crow. For it is the crow which can spontaneously read the human mind. One look at your eyes. And it sees you through. An eyeball to eyeball encounter with the crow is difficult to sustain. The crow slouches its head playfully to look into your face. It is a gaze that penetrates through your heart. There is something intimate about those twinkling eyes. It has an inexplicable connect with our soul. The ancient mysteries are inscribed in that look. It is indeed the watchful eyes of our departed ancestors, who are unable to take off their eyes from their beloved progenies. Once we start to converse with that gaze, the archetypal memories that are deeply entrenched within the unconscious starts to unfold out. But we are not capable enough to endure it. And turn away. That is our misfortune.    

In our mythologies and folklores, the crows find an enviable place in the order of things. The crows are considered to be the symbols of conjugal love and fidelity. In the dialogue by Plutarch entitled On the Use of Reason by the So-Called 'Irrational' Animals (1st Century AD), the wise pig Gryllus states that crows upon losing a mate, will remain faithful for the remainder of their lives, seven times that of a human being. The Innuits consider the crows to be the harbingers of daylight, as they welcome the dawn with their wake-up calls. For the Tlingit Indians in the North-West of the Pacific, the crow is a divine character, which organises the world, gives civilisation and culture and creates the sun. The most interesting of the legend is from Scandinavia, where the crow symbolises the twin principles of creation : the Spirit and the Memory. The crow is the treasure-house of the memory of the universe.

 
 

The crows are the birds of prophecy. In the Oriental mythology, the Mahakaala is represented by a crow in one of its earthly forms. The magnificently judicious God of Shaneesvara has chosen the Crow as His Divine Vaahana.  The most magical aspect of the crow is its ability to divine the future, organise the present and reconcile the past, by criss-crossing time. It is the most stupendous endeavour assigned  to any divine being in the Hindu cosmology. And it is the Crow which is regarded to be performing this task with a natural ease and an ethereal finesee. It has always been possible for a wise seer to comprehend the multitudinous meanings that remain hidden in the diverse calls of the crow. It pours out myriad answers to the perplexing mysteries of existence only into the ears of an ardent listener. Being the carrier of divine grace and enjoying a special intimacy with God, the crow has been created to teach human beings how to live a life full of love, humor and playfulness. 

It is always bewildering to watch a crow building its nest meticulously along with its conjugal pair atop an embracing tree. To witness the bonding between the crow pair and the ways in which they feed and nurture their young ones are life intensifying experiences. One ought to have a thousand eyes to glimpse at the rain-soaked crow preening its feathers or a pair of crows cajoling each other with their smooching beaks and caressing necks. They belong to a sublime sphere of time and space. A crow would rejoice with its beloved when we are born, when we are in love and when we die. Every significant time. For they know the mystery of birth and death, all too well. There is a poignant moment in  Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven (1845). The narrator asks a raven that had flown into his chamber, whether he could be reunited with his deceased beloved. The bird gazes imposingly, as befitting a messenger from the world of spirits and memories, but reveals nothing. It is this profound silence of the crow that compassionately envelops the vast expanse of the cosmos. And that is its beauty.

Aakkaatti : The Red-Wattled Lapwing

The experience of waking up in the middle of the night to the strange call of an unknown bird is chimerical. More so if one is fast asleep under the open sky, drenched by the carressing rays of the Moon. An eerie followed by a nameless longing, almost bordering on melancholy, will fill one's heart.

It happened long ago. During one of the summer vacations in my school days. I patted my grandfather who was fast asleep on the other coir cot beside and asked him what it was. He said it is the 'Aakkaatti bird' and went back to sleep. The incessant chirping of the crickets continued. And i remained wide awake. After a short while, it again echoed from the dark blue sky : the yonder cry of the Aakkaatti. I searched for the bird in the sky. I could see only the twinkling stars and the silent Moon looking at me. There was no bird anywhere.

The cry of the Aakkaatti became a metaphor of my lonely nights as my life turned more nocturnal. Everytime i visited my maternal grandfather's village, the nights will be filled with mythological stories narrated under the falling stars and the displacing constellations, the gazing Moon and the chirping crickets. The croaking frogs replaced the crickets during rainy season. Everything else remained the same. And the cry of the Aakkaatti will wake me up in the middle of my dreams again to be found nowhere.

Since i could never see an Aakkaatti in the night blue sky, not even the shadows of anything flying, the bird assumed panoramic shapes with varied faces in my heart. As i drifted away from my small town and the periodic visits to the village, it travelled along with me to distant cities. Milan Kundera says that life is a constant struggle between memory and forgetting. The memories of the sounds and the smells are as deeply etched as that of the images and the emotions. Even if Time - the Mahaakaal - has taken away my grandfather from me, the smell of the Earth can make me sense his body odour and his physical presence, everytime it rains. I can even hug him then. The sound of the Aakkaatti brings back to life so many starry nights which are deeply entrenched somewhere in the cosmos. The only solace of inhabiting the cityscape is that it does not rain on the Earth and there is no Aakkaatti around. So that we can continue with our masked lives without getting much perturbed.

It was in 1998 when that incident occured. Dhruv and me were suantering through the jungles of JNU when he suddenly stopped me. He pointed out at quite a large bird, with long slender yellowish legs, brownish wings and blackish head with a white patch running from the neck to the underbelly till the tail. I saw the shining red wattle around the eyes extending towards the beak. The bird was standing on one leg on the surface of the land and was looking at me. Dhruv, my birdwatcher friend from Assam, said it is called the Red-Wattled Lapwing famous for its calls in the nights. When he mentioned about the calls it makes in the nights, my heart skipped a beat. I looked at the bird again and told Dhruv that there is a bird called Aakkaatti in my village which also makes crying calls in the nights. Though the bird which we saw was beautiful, i could not compare it anywhere near to the Aakkaatti which lives in my mind's nest. I told him that this bird which we were seeing cannot belong to the same species as that of my Aakkaatti. As my Aakkaatti wont be standing on the ground for it always inhabits the skies.

After returning to the hostel, Dhruv checked up from the voluminous Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan by Salim Ali and S.Dillon Ripley and confirmed that it is called as Aakkaatti in Tamil. The characteristic sound is rendered as "Did-he-do-it" or "Pity-to-do-it"! Only after hearing an interesting mythology associated with this bird, i could get completely convinced that both my Aakkaatti and the Red-Wattled lapwing are one and the same.

And the mythology is : this wonderful bird surveys the night sky to make sure that every living creature is fast asleep and then it gets back to its home, to sleep on its back with its legs up in the sky, holding the heavens!