Four and twenty blackbirds...

I could get used to Sunday afternoons. When my house is bathed in the golden afternoon light - warm, daffodil yellow and content - the family is fed, the dishes are done and stacked and the rest of the day stretches lazily without an agenda. Today, the champak tree outside my house was full of activity and I'm partly to blame. I've started feeding the feathered visitors, mostly crows, who come for the coral-like fruit, hanging in bunches from the champak tree. Why would I do that when there's fruit a-plenty? Because a certain grey-chested crow, with one slightly limp wing, came to rest on my boundary wall last week. I placed some rice and milk in a corner and he polished it off in a trice, his beak a Hoover, sucking the grains of rice and then slurping the rivulets of milk, noisily. He was back the next morning. And he got warm idlis and chutney. The next day I didn't see him but left some upma all the same. My father later told me he saw some squirrels nibbling on left-overs too. Today, there were four crows, a mynah, a baby squirrel and an eagle who flew over the pieces of dosa and scared away the crows for a few minutes. The banquet table is getting crowded.