The Crow and the Mango

Ben Antao

This morning Dr. José Colaço posted a story about the crow sitting on a tree, doing nothing all day. His moral:  To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up. His moral triggered this story of mine, but I extend the moral: 

When you're sitting high up, not only you do nothing but also you get a free lunch!

Just another point of view!

As a nine-year-old, I would often sit in my verandah in Velim and watch the mango tree near the community well, twenty feet across from our compound wall. 

Now the tree, which belonged to the middle-aged widow who lived alone in the house next to it, would yield copious fruit of the malcorado variety and the owner rarely bothered to harvest it. 

From my seat in the glorious sunlight of May, I would see a crow perched on the top branch and smell the ripe orange-gold mango. For three years in a row in each season, I would see a big black crow, its plumage glistening, choose the best pick of the crop, always on the topmost branch, and peck at the fruit.

I was jealous of the crow for always eating the best-looking and most-enticing mango. I was expecting the ripened fruit to drop in the gust of wind and I could then walk across and pick it up.

When you consider that for days on end I had kept my eye on that mango as it grew and turned from green to gold, I felt I deserved it for my patience. But the crow frustrated me each time. And I would ask myself, "Why should the crow get the best fruit on the tree and not me? I went to Mass every morning and served as an altar boy and I should be rewarded more than that crow."

Now, one of the priests whom I served at Mass was Padre Olympio Colaco, who lived with his three unmarried sisters in a big house, the third one to my right. In his wide and deep front yard also were four mango trees always in full bloom and full of fruit. 

Now, according to the village custom, if you happened to see a fruit--mango, cashew or coconut--fall from a tree, you could pick it up and take it home. As a young boy, I would wait until after lunch--siesta time for most households--to make my rounds of the vaddo to pick up any mangoes
that had fallen.

Once in May, returning home from the Colaco vaddo, about one-thirty in the afternoon, a strong breeze suddenly swept up and a ripe mango fell in the front yard of Padre Olympio's house. I ran towards it and just as I bent down to pick it up, my eyes averted to the verandah where Padre Olympio was rocking in his chair. I froze in shame, seeing that I had served his Mass that morning.

 He had a rattan stick in his right hand and he waved it and nodded his serene face, indicating I could have it. I smiled and ran towards my house, feeling good about the priest.
 

July  24, 1999                                     Alfredo's post in response