Bird in a Cage

 

Like many Indian households, I grew up in a house with birds. Sadly, caged. Cramped in our cities, with very little garden greens to soothe our souls, we often use caged birds to usher in a bit of nature in our lives. Quite an irony, isn’t it? But that’s how it goes. Without understanding the cruelty that we thus impose, we often find in these beautifully plumaged birds a source of joy, excitement and even purpose. Just like all other human conquests, obviously.

But all sarcasm aside, I did love these winged wonders as a child. I remember I had two badris - ‘budgerigar’ was way beyond my lexicon then. So badris they were, from faraway distant Australia, one pistachio green and mustard yellow, and the other a tumble of teal, indigo and white. And then, in another cage used to thrive a bunch of finches - chestnut mannikin finches, red browed finches and the prettiest of the lot, the strawberry finch or avadavat, more commonly called the munnia . Looking at them prancing from swing to branch to their nest was as delightful as was observing their habits and more importantly, anatomy. A few more species and any kid would have become a home grown Darwin! Looking after them was perhaps the first time the youngest sibling in the house like me would have been made responsible for someone else. Refilling their feed and water, giving them a once-in-a-while special feed of a stony feast (that I understood as the cuttlefish skeleton years later), taking them out of the house for a bit of sunshine, giving them a shower on a hot summer day and yes, keeping an eye out for the nasty neighbourhood cats were indeed tasks that built character. It was just so interesting to watch these colourful birds flit about, fly, even nest and rear young ones! The size of a munia egg baffled me the first time I saw it. 

But after the vivacity of life came the melancholy of death - yet another important lesson in the cycle of life that would leave a big imprint on any young, pliant mind. It took time for me to realise, much later in life, that when you have invested so much of yourself in anything in the universe, you imbibe a part of them in you, and in the process let go a part of yourself in them. It is then that the loss ushers pain, for you end up losing a sliver of yourself, not in tangible flesh or blood but in intangible existence itself. First, the badris started showing signs of distress - malaise, languor or illness, we never knew, but the birds were not the same. Far from the red outback down under, where these gregarious birds fly in the hundreds and travel for thousands of miles,  isn’t it a miracle that they survive even a month in captivity so far off from home? At about the same time, the finches began to die. An assault from a feral cat seemed to have started a series of distressful deaths. I still remember, an eight-year old me, wrapping up a dead munia in a paper, and sealing it properly with sellotape and staples - lest the ants eat it up - before burying it in one corner of the backyard garden. In that sadness, the universe seemed like a cold, harsh place - why did this beautiful little bird, so full of energy, have to die? Perhaps it was a favour by the same universe to the rather pitiful existence of the birds. Nonetheless, the deaths became a favour to the other birds, when my mother - also saddened by the deaths - decided to free the others lest they succumb as well. And one summer dawn, my mom, who had insisted on bringing these avians in the household, did the unexpected - she released the birds, resolving in her own melancholy never to bring in caged birds in the household again. The ephemeral joys of their colours are far outweighed by a long, lingering weariness that echo in the emptiness of their absence. The world perhaps then, in manifesting life, does not discriminate in form, shape or size - the very existence of life is an energy, which if not felt in its presence is definitely missed in its absence. Yes, human lives are definitely given this seriousness, but ask the old man who has lost his dog, or the little kid who has lost a catfish or a munia, you can feel the same degree of saudade in their eyes, if not their words. The emptiness makes us pensive, sit up and listen to our souls that resound with timeless lessons from the milky way. It was also then that I had learnt that sadder times make for far better teachers than happy times make for drinking buddies. The latter offers adrenaline pumped euphoria and of course, much needed reasons to celebrate life, but the former offers that lump in our throats that rises up the chakras to make us wiser.

This first episode definitely made me more sensitive to the idea of mortality, if not anything else. For many days thereafter, I could feel an emptiness that left me bereft of a sense of duty. In other words, the purpose of my everyday life was made less significant as there was no one to take care of. That space occupied erstwhile by the cages seemed to stare back at me, making me wonder who was lonelier of us two. Until time slowly and steadily creased the wrinkles and provided new activities to forget the old.

I say, first episode, because there came a second, many years later. I was in college by then, and was more focussed on the rat races, and cracking entrance exams to be bothered by avian duties; nonetheless I couldn’t help notice the euphoria that came in the house from one rose- headed parakeet which serendipitously entered into our lives. It was during a thundering nor’wester that this little parakeet came crashing into our house with a broken wing. My mother, always having a special urn of affection for the underdogs and the downtroddens, took it on herself to nurture this little bird and restore it until it could fly again. The scars from the earlier wound still seemed to exist in all our mindsets and retaining the parakeet caged was definitely not a long -term solution for anyone. Having got a temporary home, the bird also needed a house - in this case, an old rattan cage. And that was how Mithu came into our lives. As I have mentioned, I was was too busy with my self-imposed academia and hostel stays to have noted the antics of this intelligent bird, but I had heard a lot about the amusement that she had brought about in my family. My mother never wanted to keep her caged, so Mithu had the luxury to occasionally walk about in the house. She also took long to recover her damaged wing, and perhaps therefore preferred to walk. I would hear a lot of how Mithu would come out of her cage and look at my mum, cutting fruits and vegetables as part of her daily chore - and in the process demand a share of her own; of how, the bird would slowly learn to use human words, mimic voices, and even get a ‘feel’ of who to trust, and who not to. There were people in the household and visitors who would get unprecedented rights to the bird, and then there were those in the bad books who would be squawked upon, bit, scratched and even chased. The amazing manifestation of life, I would wonder, as I would hear these tales over phone - I wouldn’t want to use the term ‘intelligent life’ here as all life is intelligence - that part which we cannot understand, be it the hovering of sandflies or the groveling of earthworms, is our own lack of intelligence.

Months passed by, Mithu had recovered but did not fly off - perhaps she was used to the human comforts of everyday life, or actually liked the humans around her, or was indebted to those who had saved her in a thunderstorm - we will never know, but that the bird could open the latch to its cage and walk out any moment, and yet had decided to stay back seems like a small amount of redemption to our earlier incarceration of other kinds of Mithu’s class. But it was a trip to Shantiniketan that changed it all - my parents while returning from Shantiniketan had stopped by the verdant roadsides for a break. It was then that my mother saw a bunch of similar parakeets and, perhaps all awashed by Tagore and his inimitable philosophies of life, had a Kabuliwalah moment - she realised the actual life that Mithu should have : that with her own kind, in the boundless liberty of green fields and blue skies. As Tagore himself would have said, Amar mukti aloy aloy ei akashe - my liberty lies in the lights of the heavens!

Though deeply saddened by their own decision, my parents half-heartedly repeated the same journey a week later. Not to understand ‘peace’ as the Poet would have penned or professed, but to practice it, all within the pensiveness of liberating a psittacine member of the family. When mum released Mithu, in that nature-filled ambiance of bright skies and green openness, all the bird’s instincts seemed to have come back. Mithu hesitated for a single moment, then walked out and spread her wings of liberty. She took one look back at the two people who had given her this second life, and Mithu flew out to to start her third chapter. That single look back was the moment of peace that my parents thought would never come, but it did, in a sense of closure that often even the closest relatives cannot provide with all their knowledge and emotions.

When I look back at all of this today, I often wonder why my mum, who loved birds more than anyone else in the family, decided to act thus. Mithu could have stayed for longer still in the household, continuing to be a source of joy and amusement to my mum, at a time when the children in the house had grown up and were out exploring their own worlds. But perhaps she liberated Mithu because somewhere she found redemption of her own. Like most Indian women of her time and a very large proportion even today, she had spent the best years of her life sacrificing her needs to set the foundations for her own children. In a way, then, the metaphor of the cage was most strongly understood by her, and in liberating Mithu willingly and tearfully, mum was liberating that part of herself that had by then become a part of the bird, something that she was not privy to when the opportunities would have existed years back.

If I extrapolate this a bit further, we are all then no different to Mithu, living in our own cages. Some, are already built into our society through generations of beliefs and practices, while others are self -imposed. We are then, all birds in our own cages, having the ability to open them and walk out, yet choosing to stay cooped in, wondering when will we see blue skies. If we are lucky, people like my mum may walk into our lives, and show us the meaning of liberty; if not, we crib of broken wings which were repaired years back.  

And then there are those select eclectic few, who transcend all of the world’s offerings of gilded cages and silvered traps, and in the process understand and experience the higher euphoria of life. For them, the cages are a mere illusion, which don’t exist as don’t we or our wings or our owners. They are then able to sing, experience or even leave behind that secret for generations to come, just as the great Gurudev has tried to remind us…

Aamar mukti aaloy aaloy ei aakashe,

Aamar mukti dhulay dhulay ghaase ghaase.

Dehomoner sudur paare haariye pheli aaponare,

Gaaner sure aamar mukti urdhe bhaase…

My liberty lies in the light of the heavens, 

My liberty in the dust and grass belongs,

Far beyond this body, mind, I lose myself

As my liberty soars in the melody of the songs…

7th Sep’2021