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She has a glossy black head, speaks five languages and has fine taste in cheese. Oh, and she has whiskers and scales on her feet. Meet Pappu, a very intelligent crow. And our pet.
Pappu adopted us in December. Until then, she was just another neighbourhood bird. She’d pop by scavenging for crumbs. One day, she came and sat by the dining room window. She cawed. I took a little piece of bread and held it out instead of throwing it to her. She took it from my hand.
Overjoyed, I told the family. They told me not to talk rot. Then they saw her eating, a little warily, from my hands. They began feeding her too. We didn’t know it then, but Pappu had begun training us.
She started with food. We innocently thought crows ate everything. Anything. But Pappu is posh. She rejects bread crusts. She won’t touch leftovers. What she likes — loves — is the soft centre of fresh bread. Fluffy warm rice. Boondi. Biscuits. And cheese. The latter we discovered when we were eating sandwiches. When Pappu came, I gave her a piece. She relished the cheese, spat out the bread. We made two discoveries that day: ours is a cheese-crazy crow. And she spits out the food she doesn’t want.
She doesn’t like a lot of things. Mostly, she hates being ignored. When she comes to the grill, we must quickly find something she might be in the mood to eat. If not, she caws the roof down. She has a knack for knowing when the husband is on a conference call, trying to impress clients and colleagues. And she always chooses that moment to begin her mimicry show.
Our pet knows five languages. We can understand three. One is regular crow. The other, when she’s happy and fed, is the treepie chuckle. The third is a hacking-bark. We wonder if she’s copying the dogs. By then, the husband is gesturing wildly, begging with his eyes and mouthing ‘Shut the crow up!’ We sigh and bring out the cheese slice. That makes her very happy. She takes it carefully, holds it under her claws and pecks at it delicately. Then she wipes her beak this way and that on the grill and she’s off.
Pappu also speaks several ‘dialects’ in ‘crow’. She begins the day with ‘God-I’m-Dying-Give-Me-Food’, sounding weak and hungry, as if she were auditioning to be a beggar in a play. The moment she’s fed, the tone softens. But if the bread is not to her liking, her eyes glint. She ruffles her feathers, goes all fluffy and protests. Loudly.
When she’s eaten enough, she makes the ‘uhhnnn-I’m-so-constipated’ sound. This, she achieves by closing her beak and pushing her body forward. This call is startling and odd, somewhat between a grunt and a moan.
She recognises faces. She eats from us. If somebody new offers her food, she is horrified and flaps backwards. She also knows her name. If she’s late in the morning, I put my head out and yell ‘Pappu!’ The security guards giggle, but she always comes. Now and then, she does something silly: when I call her, she looks at her bottom…
In the afternoons, she comes for a chat. Or sits quietly on the clothes stand (on the husband’s underclothes!) and gazes at the trees. Often, her side-kick — we call him Minion — comes along. He’s bigger than her, not very friendly, and insists on being beak-fed by Pappu. We think he might be her son. Because he makes a baby-crow noise when she shoves food into his large beak. Then he spits everything out and eats it again. His table manners are appalling.
Pappu’s is better, but how she fusses. I once tried fruits worried that cheese might upset her tummy. ‘Pappu,’ I told her sternly. ‘I watched a Youtube video in which small, well-behaved birds are eating fruit puree. Be a good girl and eat this?’ I held out pomegranate seeds. She picked one from my palm. Then she turned her head and spat. I got angry. I pushed the next further into her mouth, hoping she'd taste it. I saw her black tongue touching it, feeling it. She spat again. Minion, standing below her, went crazy. He picked up each seed she discarded, until his chin bulged. Then he hopped a few feet, brought it all up and looked sadly at the twice-spat pomegranates.
All day, Pappu flaps about the neighbourhood. She’s also quite territorial. She screams at pigeons, cats and squirrels. The only person she allows up close is Minion. He sits next to her and presents his head. She grooms it and inspects his ears. We can tell when she’s nearby from her voice, her unusual chuckles. On her chatty days — mostly when she’s had plenty of cheese — she paces outside, talking to herself. If she had hands, I suppose she’d cross them behind her back and look important and grand.
One morning, Pappu arrived smelling of garbage. At five paces, we knew she had eaten something that died long ago. 'Pappu!' I wagged my finger at her. She nipped it gently. Her beak is strong. She breaks biscuits, rips rotis. But she never hurts me. I long to touch her. ‘Just the chin, just once, please Pappukush?’ I coo. And sometimes, when she is in a state of cheesy bliss, I stroke her. But she dislikes it, and either pecks or flies away.
Someday, I hope she’ll sit on my shoulders. ‘Like goddess Meenakshi,’ I told the family. ‘That is a parrot,’ they pointed out. ‘Oops. Which god has a crow?’ I asked. ‘ >Shani Bhagawan ,’ came the amused reply.
Maybe I’ll just feed her cheese and stroke her chin.
