Parrot-Daughter
When we were growing, my mother was always a busy person.
Three of us were proving to be handful for her and being all boys, she had to
show more patience and ‘strength’. She used to remain busy preparing us for our
schools, making us study along with the daily chores of home. As time passed
by, we all 3 brothers moved away from home for education.
Once a busy-bee, now she had remained with an empty house
and all the time in the world. In her words, “all off springs flew away one by
one, leaving the nest empty”. Once you have a purpose, you keep working towards
it and it gives meaning to daily activities. But once the purpose is unavailable,
the activities become mundane and days become harder to pass by. A vacuum
having elongated time and entrenched space is like the ‘matrix’, you never know
what is a dream and what is reality, one becomes the continuation of the other.
Then father brought a “parrot”. A first pet as an addition
to the family. Now her daily life got some additional activities like feeding,
talking to the baby-parrot.
She always dreamt to have a daughter. Mother and daughters
share some special bonding which on contrary father and sons seems not to develop.
I can always remember her favourite line, “If only I had one daughter……..” She
never completed the sentence but this half-empty sentence became a part of her
existence, something lacking in her otherwise happy and content life.
Now that she had a parrot, the vacuum of a daughter could be
easily fulfilled. Faith and belief are powerful forces, they can give life to
stone-idols, age-old rituals; here she was having a living parrot. She could
now talk for hours with her and her existence became complete. The monologues
with her daughter parrot became a placebo for curing her pangs of loneliness.
Well life was going through its rhythm when one day she
forgot to lock the cage and parrot flew away. This sad event again brought her
life to halt, she would sit in the front porch of the home and look at the nearby
trees with hope that her daughter was somewhere nearby and had just forgotten
her way back home. The endless wait and constant looking on trees made us feel
helpless, emotional attachments are really difficult to get away with. The repeated
offers to have another parrot were summarily rejected with a vow to never have
a pet again.
Father was compassionate and wise in saying, “Well! Daughters
are meant to leave home and one can’t have the luxury to keep them for life”. We
were little unkind and used to tease her, “Daughters are flying away from home,
all by themselves these days”.
Those were the days of rainy season and every year these
monsoon winds bring back those memories of a daughter she once had…
.jpg)