by Saranya Subramanian
Saranya writes a poem on the most committed being that she knows of – the crow who visits her home every morning. He is always there, eats on time, and leaves right after, only to visit again the following day.
After Nissim Ezekiel’s The Visitor
He sits outside the window sill
every morning at ten AM,
and caws three times, he knows the drill,
and rests his legs, two skinny stems
outside our home. His feathery
face, a wet tissue, is all wrung
and dry and trembling. The tree’s
cruel branches that morning flung
him out of his own home. So now
he caws and coos and caws some more
and begs the dogs and cats and cows
for extra scraps. In storms he soars,
keeps ducking from the crumbling sky
to drop by us at breakfast time,
right on time for when Ma walks by,
just having fed the gods. He climbs
up the window as she greets him,
and asks for his blessings before
feeding him rice. And then she sings
a hymn to Thatha, to the soul
once in the face frozen in glass
upon the wall. It seems fitting
that the scavenging middle class
would find the dead in scavenging
birds. Perhaps it is Thatha, and
he comes to greet his family,
to tell us how afterlife’s grand.
Or perhaps it’s just a formality
because the scriptures ask for it.
Or perhaps he’s just a crow on whom
we must stop placing grief and guilt
and leave the dead to rest in tombs.
Saranya is a 22-year-old literature aficionado, based in Bombay. She spends her time singing to herself and watching Madhubala videos (sigh). And she writes because, well, it’s all that she can really do.
