Legend of “One-Legged Crow”

Today I saw a one-legged crow... again... it’s been so many years but I still very clearly remember the last one-legged I saw... I was in school those were the days when a one legged crow would get more attention than a girl showing her cleavage... those days are gone for good now... like any other our neighborhood also was infested with 100 of crows cawing but what other neighborhood I suppose lacked was this legendry one-legged crow.

Seeing this crow flying around with one limping leg had given rise to many legends and myths in the neighborhood. The children who played in the street openly talked about these legends. According to some, the crow lost his leg while rescuing his female from the clutches of a hungry ‘cheel’ (a kind of an eagle)... some said he lost his leg after falling from his nest while asleep, some said he lost his leg while trying to walk ‘huNs ki chaal’ (an Urdu idiom- if a crow tries to walk like a crane, he loses his own place)

I was also part of this legend mongering crowd which believed in so many stories about this crow. Whoever in the street used to spot this crow, they used to shout aloud for the benefit of others:woh dekho, langRa kawwa !! (Look, one-legged crow is here) This made every one in the street stop their work and look for the crow. Drivers used to hang their necks out of car windows to look for it, street cricket batsmen used to tell approaching bowlers: “ek minute yaar, woh... kawwa... oopar?” (Just a minute friend that crow, look up) Within days, this crow, backed by all kinds of legends and myths, grew so much in popularity that he became a household name in the locality.

We saw the crow’s limping flight for few months but the rot had set in. After few months the crow lost his popularity. Thereafter, he just became part of the area landscape and nobody paid much attention to his flight. One eyed black cat... brown striped street dog became more popular. Apparently, the crow didn’t like this fall from fame hood. So one sunny evening, the crow came down on an un-suspecting passer-by and pecked the passer by’s head with his beak and flew away to the nearby tree. The passer-by started screaming, pointing towards the tree and people started gathering around him in sympathy. Very soon somebody in the infringing crowd said what everybody was thinking. That somebody said: “langra kawwa pagal ho gaya hai”(the one-legged crow has gone mad).

From that day onwards the popularity graph of the crow climbed up steeply. Overnight he was declared as ‘one-legged-half-brained’ crow. His status changed from a celebrity hero to that of a devil-may-care villain. The new status also gave rise to new legends and myths about how and why the crow lost his mind. Some said that it is because the crow society made one-legged crow an outcast so he lost his mind, some said it is because rest all the female crows refused to marry him and some again said that it is because he again fell out of his nest while asleep.

The crow on the other hand was becoming more and more carnivorous by the day. Now he started pecking anyone who passed under the street-tree he used to live on. There were a couple of people who were his famous victim. One was a boy who worked in a neighborhood. The crow had some ‘zaati dushmani’ (personal enmity) against this boy. As soon as the boy entered the street, the crow would start screaming ‘kaaeN kaaeN’ and followed the boy home while diving and pecking on his head repeatedly like an air-force jet diving to make a kill. In the end this boy had to become bald and wear dark-glasses in order to fool the crow into believing that he was somebody else. This trick worked and the crow stopped harassing this boy.

Another famous victim was my own aunt. She has come to our place for a vacation and was out on her evening walk and this crow made the mistake of pecking her head. To this she became so infuriated that she started scolding aloud in the middle of the road: “kam-bakht, jhaaroo peetay, kal-moonhe, ek dafa haath aa gaya to tera soup pi jaaon gi?”(You unfortunate, broom-hitted, face-looser, if I catch you once, I’ll drink the soup made from you)Apparently the crow really got scared of such grammatically correct Urdu scolding and I don’t remember if he ever crossed her path again for next two months.

After a while the situation became so worse that the cabinet meeting of street boys was called again. I also had the honors of attending it. In the meeting there were two groups. One was a humane group which asked for mercy for the crow while other insisted on mercy for the people by giving crow a mercy-killing. Luckily the mercy for the crow group was in majority. It was then decided that the crow be caught, taken to some other neighborhood and let free. Some suggested that we should let it free in next neighborhood because they had bigger playing areas than ours but good sense prevailed and we transferred the crow to an unpopulated place. I am not sure how the crow was caught and transferred because I was not part of the ‘action committee’ which was formed to carry out this humane operation.

This happened in early nineties... almost 18 years and lot of water under the bridge has passed since then. I don’t know how long a crow lives. Hopefully he is still alive and peckin!!!