FROM THE 14TH FLOOR

Tuesday, December 5, 2006
“LEAVE & LET LIVE” says this morning’s Mumbai Mirror, describing how residents are vacating the city before tomorrow’s civil rights rally in Shivaji Park just up the street. Nearly one million Dalits – formerly known as “untouchables” – are expected to converge tomorrow on my neighborhood to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar’s death. He was their Martin Luther King. Jr., and he, too, preached non-violence, but last week the Dalits were burning commuter trains, wrecking shops and I could hear gunfire from Worli Village a few blocks away. Army and police are everywhere.

But this morning I’m thinking about this fucking crow.

The crow harangues the dawn each day from the ledge of the fourteenth floor of my apartment tower overlooking Mahim Bay. He makes his racket a few windows away from mine, perched underneath a neighbor’s rusty air conditioner. Pigeons waddle forth with embarrassed cooing from their night nests beneath other rusting air conditioners and flap away into the pale sky.

The crow calls out across the curving expanse of the bay, where the trash-strewn tide rushes in retreat from the defiled shore toward the Arabian Sea. Countless herons rise, turning and wheeling in white billowing puffs, a reproach to the festering putrescence of the mud flats below where nonetheless, swooping down to settle in the muck, they will dig up their morning repast.

It’s a mystery to me why this crow, grey collared like some perverse, defrocked cleric, comes to this particular perch to make such an annoying din but, day after day, there he is. He must know that this apartment tower has twenty-seven floors, each one boasting myriad shit-stained crow-friendly ledges. He surely knows, tooling around as he does with his equally noisy buddies, that this building is only one of the so-called Twin Towers erected on the grounds of the long defunct Bombay Dye Works, doubling the number of available ledges. And even his bird brain must have registered the half-dozen taller apartment towers in Prabhadevi and the Worli Hills along the waterside, offering an infinite number and variety of perches from which cacophonous crows can pester the buildings’ high-rent paying inhabitants. Why this guy picks mine, I don’t know… until just now.

I’m watching him tilt his head up, open his ebony beak and catch the drops dropping steadily from the air conditioner. And now it all makes sense, the crazy way things always do here. It’s his wake-up juice, his Bloody Mary, a cocktail of dust, oxidized metals, refrigerant leakage, garden variety toxins, and condensed hot water for mixer. He’s getting stoned on the stuff and is not ashamed to “crow” about it.

What he’s drinking is probably highly addictive but then again, probably not much worse for his health than anything else this neighborhood is serving. He’s still standing, isn’t he? Like me, after a week and half in India. Like just about everyone else who lives in this irresistibly poisonous city. I think I understand him now. We’re birds of a feather, so to speak. Residents of Bombay – for at least a while, anyway.

So, the fridge is stocked with food and Kingfisher beer. I’ve given my houseboy Mohan tomorrow off. He tells me “every year a bomb blast, sir. It’s compulsory.” We’ll see what happens, just me and the crow… from the fourteenth floor.