A stork stood on one leg, the other held up high.
Bopa turned to look at something else momentarily. When he looked back, he thought the stork he had seen was now on the other foot. He made up his mind to check—perhaps the stork was slowly wading in. He raised his camera with concentration, the shutter speed set fast, ready to catch the moment. He marked the stork’s left and right legs: it was standing on the right.
An interminable time passed. It became a battle of patience.
Bopa blinked—and noted that the stork was now on the left foot and seemed to be deeper in the pond. He was furious. The sun was up, and beads of sweat trickled down his neck onto his chest. Those on his forehead blinded him as they entered his eyes. He could not catch the bird in the act.
Determined, he resolved to come back on the morrow.
Instead, he went home and checked videos on his laptop—storks wading in water. He found storks walking, but never standing on one leg at all. They waded like buffalo, carefully, methodically. It was disgusting. He tried to recall the story of the meditative stork from the Panchatantra of Vishnu Gupt or from Aesop’s fables—Bagula Bhagat, the cunning stork.
He remembered the story of the stork’s friend, a cat named Goonda, who invited him to dinner and served soup in a shallow plate. Frustrated, Bagula Bhagat thanked Goonda politely and said, Next dinner at my place. The next day, Bagula Bhagat exacted his revenge by serving fish in a narrow-mouthed vase, to Goonda’s helpless consternation.
Or was it a fox? Bopa wondered.
Bopa knew animals are cunning for a reason. They do propaganda of all sorts. But Vishnu Gupt and Aesop outdid them by creating stories around them—ants and grasshoppers, foxes and grapes.
Everybody knows worker ants die off in winter. The stores they collect ferment and turn alcoholic. The queen ant—the only survivor—remains drunk on it through the cold months. Eggs are laid at the end of summer; worker ants live only a few days. Yet people go around saying: He is a grasshopper, I am an ant. He is a spendthrift, a womaniser; I am chaste, provident, moral.
What solid propaganda.
Goebbels would carry water in front of these stories, Bopa thought.
Vishnu Gupt had convinced him that foxes eat grapes, hanker after them, and that grapes grow on trees as low-hanging fruit—almost like the tree in the Garden of Eden. It was too much. He would have to rid himself of all this inheritance, this moral zoology masquerading as wisdom.
Then there is a God whose name is unpronounceable—unknown, and finally unknowable. The first thing he did was make a garden in his backyard and populate it with all kinds of animals, including a snake. There is no doubt this story takes the cake. It is so absurd, so casually staged, that it feels true. Not true in the sense of history, but true in the way the mind accepts a joke told with complete seriousness.
Stories are God’s business. Where they come from, God knows. How they melt reality—slowly, irresistibly—like chocolate on the tongue, no one quite understands.
Salman Rushdie gave stories the power to profane. In Indian, Chinese, or Greek myths, such irreverence would have passed unnoticed—absorbed, laughed at, reincarnated. But here, in the real, it stirred something ancient. It woke the fallen angel.
And the price was an eye.
Not metaphorical sight alone, but vision itself—taken as punishment, as warning, as proof that stories, when they cross certain borders, do not merely entertain or instruct. They wound. They blind. They refuse to stay inside the garden.
Bopa sat with this unease longer than he had with the stork.
He now understood that the problem was never animals, nor gods, nor even lies. It was the ease with which a story settles—the way it asks for no proof once it sounds familiar. A stork stands on one leg and becomes a monk. An ant stores grain and becomes virtue itself. A fox fails and invents sourness.
And one day—without anyone quite noticing when—people are reduced to a trait and declared greedy, inferior, or less.
Nothing violent happens at first. Only stories circulate.
Bopa saw now how effortlessly it was done. You repeat. You simplify. You moralise. You let time do the rest. The lie ripens like fruit left unchallenged. Soon even the accused begin to speak in its language, adjusting their posture, explaining themselves.
He thought again of the stork—how it had changed feet without being seen, how certainty had slipped past his eyes while he stared straight at it.
Perhaps the stork had never been meditating at all. Perhaps it was only balancing—adjusting weight, muscle, blood. But the story had already taken hold, and once a story does that, observation becomes irrelevant.
Bopa shut the laptop.
He decided that henceforth he would mistrust all stories that arrived too neatly, especially those that came with morals attached. If truth existed at all, it was likely clumsy, half-seen, and unwilling to stand on one leg for anyone’s camera.
And somewhere, in a pond that refused to be photographed honestly, the stork lifted one foot again—not as a symbol, not as a lesson, but simply because living things must shift their weight to remain upright.