Of dogs and crows

Banoo Apa is all chirpy in spite of her sore throat

Frolicking in the morning sun -- away from the dead crow

Today, Banoo Apa taught us something new: ‘kutte khansi’. Nobody in our group had ever heard of this expression. “I was down with the dog’s cough,” she informed. “That is why I could not come yesterday. Now I am feeling better.”
Rukhsana Khan shrugged her shoulders: “Never heard of kutte khansi. But I am aware of sher khansi (lion’s cough). I see this every morning,” she grinned, obviously referring to Shekhawat’s extended growl during the Lion and Lioness Laughter round.
The closest analogy we could draw was whooping cough. But Siba Prasad Maitra corrected us saying that it is essentially convulsive coughing (caused by severe infection of the respiratory tract) followed by high intake of breath that sounds much like a ‘whoop’.
Banoo Apa was having a sore throat from the cough and cold caused by weather change. She had difficulty talking. But she managed to give us another factoid: A crow, once touched by human hand, is mauled to death by other crows.
“Somehow, they get to sense when one of their own comes into physical contact with a human. It would be the end of that crow. They do not tolerate human touch. They believe they are far too clever to have anything to do with creatures as inferior as us,” she said.
The provocation for this comment was a dead crow lying close to where we exercise. We were told that early morning, before we arrived in the Garden, it had fallen from the sky like a stone – presumably out of exhaustion in the dead heat. A cat instantly pounced upon it and what remained for us to see was one black wing and some feathers.
But that was enough to attract a murder of crows, circling ominously overhead and cawing continuously while we exercised. None of us dared to go anywhere close to the carcass. And with Banoo Apa’s warning, we became all the more petrified at the sight of what was once a crow.