Parrot-Daughter

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…