By Lokubanda Tillakaratne
On January 13, 1896, Mark Twain, the American novelist and humorist sailed to Colombo aboard the steamer SS Oceana on the way to Bombay, now known as Mumbai. He had a one-day layover and stayed in the Bristol Hotel near the harbor. The following day he left for Bombay.
Upon arriving in Sri Lanka, he wrote in his diary, “Dear me, it is beautiful! … and conveys whole libraries of sentiments, and Oriental charm and mystery and tropic deliciousness…” During his short stay in Colombo, the novelist also took a rikshaw ride to Galle Face. There, strolling on the green were plump-faced ladies in Victorian vogue, and probably English-speaking crows having leisure time.
The scene must have tricked the American into thinking he landed in the English Bard’s City of Kites and Crows (London) or its Victoria Park. But he found “what a dream it was of tropical splendours of bloom and blossom, and Oriental conflagrations of costume …always the arrangement compelled the homage of the eye and made the heart sing for gladness.” That was our Colombo then.
He no doubt saw and heard hullabaloos of crows in Colombo, later came to be known in the vernacular as Kolomba Kaakko. When he got to Bombay, however, he found out that his hotel balcony had already been booked by a gang of Indian crows for a conference of sorts. I reproduce in verbatim later in this essay his expressive observations of this gathering which he wrote in his travelogue, Following the Equator in 1897.
When researchers on avian affairs spent millions to learn how crows live, Mark Twain did it without spending a cent one afternoon sitting on a hotel balcony. He called the crow Bird of Birds and a work of art. But before we go to his notes about them, let me introduce what we see in our own Colombo crows.
They are perhaps the most ubiquitous, repulsive and noisiest of animals. Musical instruments cannot emulate their cawing, because a group cawing is always in disharmony.
There are village crows, and there are city crows. Village crows are mostly those stop-over types for refueling and restocking while flying towards Colombo and other big cities looking for five-course buffets. Among the big cities too, only those in Colombo were good enough to get the moniker Kolomba Kaakko. They hate it because they feel, rightly so, that they are universal, not just limited to a stingy city.
But crows are part of our life and history closer than you think. Crow’s Feet under the manicured eye socket remind us that we can see Hamara Banawara (last rites) on the horizon. Long ago, Kolomba Kaakko was an influential voting block. They were able to carve out a seaside section of Colombo and name it after them – Crow Island, their own little Galle Face green.
To many, crows are a despised sight. King Nissanka Malla in Polonnaruwa wrote on stone that a crow should not be compared to a swan. Among the cheery birds in an aviary, crows are flat prose. They are full of ill-humor – the way they walk, dull colour, always tiptoeing like a band of burglars with the intent of grabbing something and getting away.
When they are around, we cannot help but think of them as pickpockets. They have no moral scale. But they are least worried about the negativity ascribed to them. A crow always looks young, for he is a master in how to keep floodmarks of age camouflaged.
The crows possess an abundance of paraphernalia to take over a situation. When two of them get close, they just want to talk – mostly ridicule or feel sorry for people at the bus halt, calculus of the last night’s gazette notification or laugh out about a recent Social Media clip. One dead crow can assemble an army of comrades in minutes when the news spreads across the city. Then they gather around the dead body and wail, which sounds like an orchestra playing without a conductor. Then they fly out for other business in the city.
Oppressively Sociable (Mark Twain, 1897).
We wake up with the crows; rather, they ring up our wake-up call. They keep us company in many ways than all the birds around us combined. They are historic creatures. Caricatures of them are found on the walls of burial chambers of the Great Pyramid. Yet no stonecutter in ancient Sri Lanka thought it proper to carve a crow on a Moonstone. A crow atop a pyramid is a photographer’s dream.
If someone belittles a crow, he teaches us magnanimity. He just hops out to another perch or flies away. There are times when they are collectively considerate. During Perahera nights in Kandy, leaving the lake bund all to people, Kandy crows move out voluntarily to nearby Udawattekale forest so they can use toilet facilities in private.
When the city concludes the lunch hour, the Kolomba Kaakko, too, finish business. They assemble on tree tops on the banks of the Diyavanna Oya to parley and listen to fuming oratory streaming out from the bowels of the big house built on its island. Every so often they applaud the candor or excoriate the venom of these orators. Then begin to ponder the heavy yoke of the big house people are under. s
If Mark Twain took the rickshaw ride to Diyavanna Oya, and heard the big house debates, he would repeat words on crows here without a syllable missing – “(an orator) never thinks about anything but heaves out the opinion that is on top in his mind, and which is so often an opinion about some quite different thing and does not fit the case. But that is his way; his main idea is to get out an opinion, and if he stopped to think, he would lose chances.”
Occasionally crows can be gullible too. The most epic example is how one poor crow lost his piece of cake when a hungry jackal pulled off the heist just by wheedling over and over and over. Well, if we are to believe Mark Twain, and for no reason not to, that wheedling instance must have been an anomaly. Like students in a university, crows think they know everything or conduct themselves like that.
Mark Twain had mixed feelings about crows. This is what he wrote about them after observing their gathering on that Mumbai hotel balcony.
“What a state of things! For three hours the yelling and shouting of natives in the hall continued, along with the velvety patter of their swift bare feet – what a racket it was! They were yelling orders and messages down three flights. Why, in the matter of noise it amounted to a riot, an insurrection, a revolution.
And then there were other noises mixed up with these and at intervals tremendously accenting them – roofs falling in, I judged, windows smashing, persons being murdered, crows squawking, and deriding and cursing, canaries screeching, monkey jabbering, macaws blaspheming, and every now and then fiendish bursts of laughter and explosions of dynamite.
By midnight I had suffered all the different kinds of shocks there are and knew that I could never more be disturbed by them, either isolated or in combination. Then came peace – stillness deep and solemn – and lasted till five.
“Then it all broke loose again. And who re-started it? The Bird of Birds – the Indian Crow. I came to know him well, by and by, and be infatuated with him. I suppose he is the hardest lot that wears feathers. Yes, and the cheerfullest, and the best satisfied with himself. He never arrived at what he is by any careless process, or any sudden one; he is a work of art, and “art is long”; he is the proudest of immemorial ages and of deep calculation; one can’t make a bird like that in a day.
He has been reincarnated more times than God …; and he has kept a sample of each incarnation and fused it into his constitution. In some course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a democrat, a practitioner and propagator of irreverence, a meddler, an intruder, a busybody, an infidel, and a wallower in sin for the mere love of it. The strange result, the incredible result, of this patient accumulation of all damnable traits is, that he does not know what dare is, he does not know what sorrow is, he does not know what remorse is, his life is one long thundering ecstasy of happiness, and he will go to his death untroubled, knowing that he will soon turn up again as an author or something, and he even more intolerably capable and comfortable than ever he was before.
“In his straddling wide forward step, and his springy side-wise series of hops, and his impudent air, and his cunning way of canting head to one side upon occasion, he reminds one of the American blackbirds. But the sharp resemblances stop there. He is much bigger than the blackbird; and he lacks the blackbird’s trim and slender and beautiful build and shapely beak; and of course, his sober garb of gray and rusty black is a poor and humble thing compared with the splendid luster of the blackbird’s metallic sables and shifting and flashing bronze glories.
The blackbird is a perfect gentleman, in deportment and attire, and is not noisy, I believe, except when holding religious services and political conventions in a tree; but this Indian sham Quaker is just rowdy, and is always noisy when awake – always chaffing, scolding, scoffing, laughing, ripping, and cursing, and carrying on about something or other. I never saw such a bird delivering opinions. Nothing escapes him; he notices everything that happens, and brings out his opinion about it, particularly if it is a matter that is none of his business.
And it is never a mild opinion, but always violent – violent and profane – the presence of ladies does not affect him. His opinions are not the outcome of reflection, for he never thinks about anything, but heaves out the opinion that is on top in his mind, and which is so often an opinion about some quite different thing and does not fit the case. But that is his way; his main idea is to get out an opinion, and if he stopped to think, he would lose chances.
“I suppose he has no enemies among men. The whites and Mohammadans never seemed to molest him; and the Hindoos, because of their religion, never take the life of any creature, but spare even the snakes and tigers and fleas and rats. If I sat at one end of the balcony, the crows would gather on the railing at the other end and talk about me; and edge closer, little by little, till I could almost reach them; and they would sit there, in the most unabashed way and talk about my clothes, and my hair, and my complexion, and probable character and vocation and politics, and how I came to be in India, and what I had been doing, and how many days I had got for it, and how I had happened to go unhanged so long, and when would it probably come off, and might there be more of my sort where I came from, and when would they be hanged, – and so on, and so on, until I could no longer endure the embarrassment of it; then I would shoo them away, and they would circle around in the air a little while, laughing and deriding and mocking, and presently settle on the rail and do it all over again.
“They were very sociable when there was anything to eat – oppressively so. With a little encouragement, they would come in and light on the table and help me eat my breakfast; and once when I was in the other room and they found themselves alone, they carried off everything they could lift; and they were particular to choose things which they could make no use after they got them. In India their number is beyond estimate, and their noise is in proportion. I suppose they cost the country more than the government does; yet that is not a light matter. Still, they pay; their company pays; it would sadden the land to take their cheerful voice out of it.”
In conclusion, with apologies, I rephrase here Justice Robert Jackson’s opening statement at the Nurenberg trials in 1945. That Mark Twain, flushed afresh with South Asian hospitality and stung with ridicule and insult by a rowdy band of birds at a Mumbai hotel balcony stay the hand of getting even to enthusiastically write a glowing description of these rascals is one of the most eloquent yet witty tributes that a literary luminary ever has paid to a flock of feathery ones – a kaleidoscope of oddities and absurdities – a gathering of noisy Indian crows, no less.
Lokubanda Tillakaratne’s most recent book is Rata Sabhawa of Nuwarakalaviya: Judicature in a Princely Province – An Ethnographical and Historical Reading.
