A crow couple loses eggs to a tree-dwelling serpent until the crow learns that revenge is a tool best used to restore balance, not to savor rage.
Each season the crows built carefully: twig, straw, thread filched from a washerman’s line. Each season a black coil from the hollow of the tree rose like a bad idea and swallowed the future while it was still shelled. Grief scratched the bark until feathers dulled to a stormy matte. The male crow, frantic and thin, proposed war; the female proposed arithmetic. “We cannot bite what unhinges its mouth wider than our wings,” she said. “We can, however, move the world around it.” They flew to the bathing ghats where queens and courtesans left jewels in careless bowls of sunlight while the river told everyone to relax. The female crow lifted a gold necklace with a thief’s gentleness, and both birds flew low, heavy with borrowed glitter, back toward their tree. The guards shouted. Men with sticks and sharp ideas gave chase.
Instead of returning to the nest, the crows released the necklace into the serpent’s hollow and shrieked in a convincing pantomime of panic. The guards arrived, saw royal metal winking inside a shadowed coil, and did what men with sticks do best: they made a problem move. The serpent, surprised to find its home suddenly full of noise and hurry, slithered for safer property deeper in the grove. The necklace was retrieved to applause; the crows rebuilt with hands steadier than anger allows. When the chicks hatched, they learned the sound a jewel makes when it lands in the right place at the right time—a soft clink that means wit has paid rent to justice.
The crow mother did not tell her children that revenge is sweet. She told them that some victories taste like clean water: no sugar, just relief. On hot afternoons she watched the hollow where the serpent had lived and thought about how many problems look predatory and are merely comfortable in the wrong address. She taught the chicks to measure their beaks against the world not in inches but in leverage: what to lift, where to drop it, and how to make a noisy crowd do quiet good.
