Stories of Jivavarta: Birds and the Man

A long time ago, in the Jivavarta mainland, a man escaped the ravages of an ongoing war and settled with his family deep inside a forest. Although he escaped humans, he could not escape the birds.

When he grew his first crop, birds descended on his fields and started eating his crop. Enraged to his limits, he cursed at them, he shooed them away -- but the birds did not listen. They ate his entire crop.

He sowed the crop again, but this time he was ready. As soon as a first bird descended, he killed it. It felt nice, he had finally done something.

Birds did not stop coming, but he made a habit of killing a bird whenever he saw one eating his crop. After a few years, he killed them even when they were not eating his crop. He killed them merely because he had now become used to killing them.

Every time he killed a bird, he buried its body in a corner of his field and put a gravestone alongside. On the gravestone he carved a little picture of him strangling the bird, a symbol of his victory. Over time, he buried hundreds of dead birds, each with its own tiny gravestone.

Time passed, as it always does. Eventually, the man perished, and his family moved, and the place in the forest was long forgotten.

Generations later, new settlers arrived where the man had lived. They did not know anything of the man, they only knew that the land was fertile and previously people lived there. They started farming.

While tilling the fields one morning, a worker came across the skeleton of a bird under the soil. As they dug it up, they also recovered a tiny stone with the picture of a man holding the bird. Looking around, they found numerous such bird skeletons, each with its tiny carved stone with a similar picture.

They called an elder from the group to make sense of this strange discovery. The elder's age had made him the keeper of explanations, whether or not he possessed those explanations is another story.

The elder examined the skeletons and stones for a long time. Finally, he smiled and gave his conclusion.

"The man who lived here must have loved birds very much," he said, thoughtfully. "Hundreds of birds came to this place at the end of their lives. Evidently, this was sacred ground to them."

Every one believed him. After all, people prefer beautiful lies to ugly truths. And in this case, nobody knew the truth.

Out of reverence for the forgotten man, the settlers raised the man's statue on the sacred ground which was once his house. The statue showed him with a kind face and with a bird in his hand, and beneath his feet lay the stones he had placed beside the dead birds.

Every year, on the day the skeletons were discovered, the settlers gathered before the statue, kissed the sacred ground, and spoke fondly of the man who loved the birds and the birds who loved him back.

Reflection

Maybe we do not survive through memory, but through interpretation. The dead cannot contradict the living, so the living make them into whatever they need them to be. The murderer becomes a saint. The coward becomes a hero. Maybe that is what history is—the living speaking about the dead, not for what they were, but for whatever version of them best serves the living.

Sayings of Jivavarta

What the dead did in cruelty, the living remember in reverence. 
— Shon Mehta

Lexicon of Jivavarta

The Saint of a Hundred Graves — A cruel person whose deeds were misinterpreted as virtues by later generations.

The Silence of the Dead — The principle that the dead leave behind only fragments of their lives; the living interpret those fragments, and over time it becomes history.

Top concepts that capture the core of story

1. Social Construction of Reality (Sociology)

The Concept: Developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann; posits that social truths are constructed through human interaction, repetition, and institutionalization.
The Fit: Maps the pipeline: Evidence → Interpretation → Ritual → Accepted Historical Truth. The man’s actions do not change, but society's constructed reality replaces them.

2. Collective Memory (Sociology)

The Concept: Maurice Halbwachs’s principle that societies do not passively store history, but actively reshape and curate it to serve present needs.
The Fit: Directly aligns with the thesis: “We do not survive through memory, but through interpretation.” Historical truth dies; the functional myth survives.

3. Motivated Reasoning & Confirmation Bias (Psychology)

The Concept: Cognitive tendencies to process ambiguous information in ways that align with desired, emotionally comforting outcomes.
The Fit: Drives the core takeaway: “People prefer beautiful lies to ugly truths.” The Elder does not need to lie maliciously—his mind simply resolves ambiguity toward the most comforting story.



Shon Mehta is an author and philosopher, creator of the Jivavarta Universe—a grounded sociopolitical world exploring human resilience, social dynamics, and moral philosophy through systems thinking. Her novels (The Timingila, Lair of the Monster), poems, aphorisms, parables, and stories are used in academic curricula internationally and featured by Oxford University Press.