The parrot and the old sparrow

After a long, hard and wearisome journey, the parrot realised it was no longer possible for him to fly anymore. The sundown was imminent and along with the great fire ball his willpower was ready to surrender and call it a day. His wings tired, his temper losing its balance, and his beautiful colours mired in the hard journey’s perspiration--although it was winter--the parrot landed on a branch.

It broke his heart, this inability to continue on his march to the lowest set milestone for the day. But then it had been a very tough, cold, stormy day. There was no sunlight during the day. When at last the sun prevailed over the icy chaos, it was the time to call off its duty and light the other world.

The winter was at its peak. And anxious, drooping, panting was his beak. With every precious moment left of the day, the saffron slanting rays were melting into misty bays. More emboldened, the cold was creeping up. Its pinch was becoming bold to take everything in its hold.

With sad eyes the parrot ogled at the setting sun. His run had been too long and taxing. He had long forgotten the flight’s fun. Where was that fleeting, winged pun? With each breath and laboured purr, restlessness crept further into his perturbed fur. Each moment passed, pinching him with a realisation of loss and failure. With each mile the journey had become a drag. The vigour and energy, which had lifted him with brag, were now dumped in a deep pit, from where it was not possible for him to retrieve even a bit.

Then even the last ounce of strength was hit. He was fighting to save himself from a fall. After all, he had so many miles to go. The height of his flight was becoming continuously low. Finally, he bowed before the eventuality and anchored his feathery weight on a branch’s restful bait. Halting, but, didn’t bring the relief it should after a long march because he still had far, far to go.

“Merciless, frost-fanged will be the night!” he thought to his misery’s delight.

As the warmth vapoured off his body, shudder crept over with incremental ease. Anxiously he ruffled his feathers as if to loosen cold night’s siege.

“Where to spend the cold night?” he pondered from dejection’s highest height.

Everything appeared alien, uninviting and antagonistic in this freezing twilight. The night moved closer with a scary chuckle across the gray shades of the twilight. The night so near! It again put him on his toes. He realised the importance and utility of the remaining traces of the day.

He looked around like the feeble truth emanating from a sad couplet. For miles and miles everything appeared surrendered to the gloomy pal of a freezing, imminent night. All woods looked solid, unwelcoming and creviceless, without that niche that can become a bird’s hall. His despair and agony touched another peak.

His sad reverie was broken. He heard a muffled, breaking-free, old, juvenile chuckle. It was an old sparrow. The greyish patches in his fur long put under time’s harrow. The oldie was flapping its feathers in a water puddle. So old and bathing in such freezing winter’s hold! The young parrot’s senses went into a chilly huddle while staring at the scene in the puddle.

Even to a tired body, dejected mind and subdued soul, advice comes very easily.

“Hey such a cold night is waiting! Take care it doesn’t become death’s baiting! Old fellow you must take care and should not extend your dare to the extent of catching cold, fall sick and lie on death bed!” the warning came with ease from his beaten, sulking self.

The old bather, the fun freak, stopped in the middle of an ecstatic shriek. But within an instant his seasoned enthusiasm regained its footing. Again the old punster squeaked and chirped to match the huge heaves of happiness sashaying across his old turf.

“My old coat has enough room for the water to turn to warm vapours and shun and beat the death’s creepers. Each moment has to be lived like a full day before I fall asleep forever. Before that I have to live, and fear nothing, worry about nothing, and get everything that can be drawn from each and every moment. I have to milk the time’s udder totally dry bro!” it tweeted, whistled and made a frenzied display of dancing in the muddled waters.

The old sparrow had raised a storm: a riot of happiness; a cascade of mirth. In between he paused and pantingly opened his beak to fill his old lungs for more life, more vigour and more strength. The young, beaten, subdued and defeated parrot looked on from the branch. It appeared silly and illogical to him.

“What could have happened to make this oldie so happy?” he wondered.

With his saggy, drenched feathering, the sparrow heaved his old bones to fly to him for a hearing. The moment he landed on the branch, he brought scaring, exciting, adventurous jolt of mirthfulness. The branch shook with the force of his liveliness. The young parrot tightened his claws and ruffled his feathers to maintain his perch. He was hardly done with it when a vigorous pat landed on his left tired wing. The old sparrow’s right wing landed with a casual, supportive and friendly force. Again the force of the old bones jolted the tired young bones.

“Tired!” the oldie asked.

“Yaa,” the parrot could manage a weak squeak.

“Well, most often we get more tired in the mind than the body,” the oldie puffed up his chest, ruffled his feathers, and twitched his tail to rearrange his gear.

There was a little shower on the parrot. He shook with a sense of cold and moved away a bit. The distance between them was too little for two strangers.

“New to the place, hummn,” the seasoned native of the land asked the visitor.

The branch was still swaying with the inertia of the vital last drops of life in the old sparrow’s body. The newcomer insecurely, apprehensively, worryingly gripped the wood. A cold night and darkness was all playing in his mind. 

“Where are you flying to?” the oldie asked softly, suppressing his enthusiasm, feeling the parrot’s discomfort.

“I have to go far. Shouldn’t have stopped at all. But then my wings gave in,” the parrot sighed, traces of defeat and loss all strewn over his green.

The sparrow gave an assuring, comforting smile. “During the day, do your best. Night is just and just for the rest. No flight can last forever. Rest is not stopping. It’s just the beginning of another league in the journey,” there was mystic calmness in his old, dim eyes.

The parrot looked at him and sighed. He wanted to say so much about his trials, tribulations and unmet goals and scattered ambitions. Too much was striking inside to pour out. He preferred to keep quiet.

“Why sit here and ponder over the path which you can’t even see in this impending dark? Dear I have no family and live in my palatial hole in the trunk of a banyan. Come with me, my place is at your service!” The sparrow spoke with the grace of an old patron.

There was almost no choice for the parrot. In the hot pursuit of another mile, he had missed many a nice shelters on the way during the evening. Little did he realise that one has to stop. Stopping isn’t a defeat. It’s biding time for the victory. And when his body and the day’s last rays both gave in, stopping was enforced. He had to stop and now take the option that presented itself. He thus followed the old sparrow to his wood-hole. The latter whistled all the way, chirped songs and hummed notes of strange happiness.

“What makes him so happy?” the parrot following the sparrow again wondered.

They sneaked into the cosy, warm confines of the sparrow’s wood-hole. It ran deep and appeared perfect for the best sleep. There was a nice bed of softest sinews. The sparrow’s raw, bursting enthusiasm had turned to a palpable silence, contentment and restfulness which pervaded the wooden abode.

Outside, the weather turned as bad as possible in a single night. A horribly chilly, stormy night. No light for miles in sight. A furious rainstorm lashed the tree as if to uproot the earthy shackles and set it free to fall. But the tree was strong. After all, it was the choice of such a seasoned player, the master who knew the strength and fragilities of the woods. The banyan withstood the deathly throng.

“I live here all alone, but in constant company of my peace, rest and happiness,” the old host spoke with half-closed eyes, resting his slightly crooked back against the wood.

“What makes him look so happy, no longer in pursuit of anything?” the guest again wondered.

“Though memories and reminiscences sometimes sneak in through my door to moan over my beautiful, active, youthful past. Darted when I fast. Wooed damsel sparrows with mischievous finesse. Raised families, driven by my instinct’s pull,” there was a loud thunderclap outside and the narrator stopped.

Lightening struck somewhere. It shook the earth. A sinister flash of lightening sneaked into the shelter. The parrot shook with fear. The sparrow laughed and assured him of safety. He had seen many such storms.

“The storms aren’t there to kill. They support life, even though it may not appear on the surface. I have seen it. Most of our fears are phantoms,” he chuckled.

The parrot listened. He again made himself comfortable.

“Well coming back to my past that sometimes sneaks in to disturb like this lightening did to you now. Age then caught with me. Most of the beauties lie at a distance, teasing you to run after. My eyes but no longer see them. Feeble eyes you know! When I completely shut them off, my eyes, they even sense the death’s blood-thirsty hound. So I open them and just be myself. Me with my weak eyes. I just see the small, dimmed world sprawled in close proximity to me,” the old host paused and pecked his saggy feathering with his blunted beak.

“So his happiness is a compromise with his disability and old age,” the guest thought.

“You know what,” the host broke the parrot’s chain of thoughts regarding the compromise resulting in a forced happiness. “To justify a well-lived life, when the force of youth is on your side to propel you towards your goals, the conclusion, the slowdown has to be also well-managed, well-paced, voluntary, not an accident. Ending is as important as beginning. With an accidental, aggrieved ending the essence of the beginning and build-up gets lost,” the sparrow’s slow-paced words again dispelled the parrot’s just derived theory of enforced happiness born of old age and weakness.

The parrot’s body was aching and he would have fallen dead asleep, if not for the question that was puzzling him to the extent of forgetting the pains of his fatigued self.

“So I live happily as the tail-end of a great life lived. The force of beginning, starting, acceleration! And the path of letting it go, losing the pace slowly, gracefully, receptively. The deceleration.  Slowing down with effortless muse. To stop finally. It can give as much excitement as the force of starting. And then the final rest. And during the slowing down phase, the time becomes slow, the world is a small puddle around your feet. You live like in a dream. A slow-paced one, minutes stretched like hours, days like weeks, weeks like months, months like years. In slowing down gracefully, effortlessly, one can live a dozen lives lived in the beginning mode,” the old sparrow coughed a bit, and then with a smile, telling his guest that all was well, took a pause.

A sudden grip of sleep would have drawn the parrot into a deep slumber but then he heard the words again. He driven and lynched by the starter’s force; the other one leading the rickety carriage to its stopping shelter. A journey completed by two characters. A life lived by two characters, separately, but summary being of just one life. A beginning and an end. The latter part was so comforting that it appeared to seep into the turbulent phase of his own first leg of the beginner’s state.

“Enjoyed I the choices that fate sieved for me. Just grabbed my share. Now I pick up and play among those things and chaff discarded that remain unwanted above as the fine particles, much in demand trickled below. But it’s great fun I tell you. In youth we just think that life means rolling in the sieve’s fine brew. Life can be equally enjoyable among the discarded heap, little malformed grains, sand-grains, specks and twigs. Now I roll like a child in the rubble of the past, which was once waylaid by the youth’s blast. It is now the precious wealth of my old age. Mellows down the rage in this haze. There aren’t any takers for it now. So I enjoy it alone, without that competitive drone,” the old host, away from the fire, cosily lying at the margin, where faintest traces of warmth touched his old fur before moving into the cold darkness.

The majestic slow down, as important and enjoyable as the headlong thrust of the beginning. The source, the beginning, and the slowdown, and the end. A cycle.

“And try even to get bold against this winter’s hold,” the oldie chuckled, patting his faded fur with the end of his wing.

“Has he achieved all he wanted in life to make him so happy?” the parrot wondered.

“During youth I flew majestically high to beat the cold with my blood’s warmth. Now wisdom swarms. I don’t go out in the storms. I just go along the gentle breeze’s pace. So I find ways to brightly light my days with these feeble rays. In this cosy wood-hole of mine, drunk I’m with my age’s vintage wine. I know that I may not go out of this hole to ride softly on time’s back at some dawn. When death will pick up the pawn. Leaving this old fur and feathering engraved in this wooden niche. But it doesn’t make me sick. That time hasn’t yet come. And I have the leisure of stretching moments till then to the capacity of my old bones. Also, that sleep doesn’t appear different from the ones I enjoy now,” a gripping calmness emanated from each word he spoke.

Outside, the storm was tossing with a self-ravaging fury, consuming itself, jolting everything around, breaking, snapping wood. The banyan was but sturdier beyond any storm’s destructive lust. It stood firm as if the calmness from the old sparrow’s restful soul was seeping into the wood, giving it strength.

The parrot had been in the hot pursuit of the orchards beyond the forests, deserts and ocean, where fruits of unheard sweetness lay more abundantly than the grass below, where the sweet cooing female parrots, of unparalleled colours and beauty, seduced youth to the pleasure’s farthest end. His happiness lay too far. How can he be happy till he got all that he desired?

“The pitcher of desires no longer exists. I dropped it long time back, realising its weight. If you have it, the desire to have it full can be a real pain, I tell you. Even if you kill yourself to fill it, and suppose you succeed, still there is no escape from the torment. Then the fear of losing it strikes. So where is the rest? I have been having beakfuls of fun. No storage, nothing. But I’m happy. It won’t be possible hadn’t I been happier earlier. To die happy, to happily slow down, one should have been happier earlier during the blasting stage,” the old sparrow tweeted and whistled as if recalling the happier times.

“This old fart must have hit gold during his youth, and now he is just rolling in happiness as a pensioner, munching the leftovers,” the parrot thought.

“The sinews holding life to my body have become weak and almost bloodless. These will not feel the pain of cleavage. It will be just like an autumn leaf being painlessly windblown into the oblivion. In this tepid existence of mine, between hot and cold, warmth and coolness pervade over my old bones in some pleasant, vague proportion. Pleasure and pain seem to have lost their specifications. Neither both exist, nor they are dead altogether,” the old sparrow looked at the guest.

The parrot appeared restless even in this cosiest of a safe hideout. How could he be? A bigger storm of unhappiness was raging inside.

“How come you look so subdued and sad?” the sparrow asked. “Have the conditions been so bad to rob all the real charm and leave the colour on the feathers and soul so dull and poor?”

The pain inside broke all check-dams of restraint and the parrot spoke out.

“Though I’m young but the spirit seems to have sung the last song of life. Too much has been the pain and strife. My courage appears to have run dry now, although the colour on my feathering holds somehow,” the parrot stopped and sighed.

Outside the storm touched a newer peak. The wind screeched. Rain lashed. Lightening struck. Some tree nearby fell with a huge snapping, cracking sound. The parrot shivered with fear. The sparrow calmed him down.

“When just a hatching, father was gone. Grew I up hearing mother’s moan. The paternal sun thus never shone. However, the biggest consolation was the mother’s caressing, preening, feeding beak. Ate I fruits at love’s supreme-most peak. As the sole nestling, I was fattened on her love’s labour daylong. And then went to sleep hearing her lullaby and song. Aha! Sweetest dreams came with a throng! My whole existence was tethered to her maternal pole. The brightest attractive-most star sole!” there were tears in the parrot’s eyes.

He was lost in his mother’s memories. The sparrow looked on sympathetically.

“Under her great grooming, colours on me came bright. Lavishly my green and red flashed as I fluttered and flapped for my first flights. Unbelievable was the pride and compassion as her souring soul’s maternal shades touched the brightest heights. In her eyes I saw a new light. How marvellous was the sight!” the parrot smiled and then stopped as if some painful recalling stabbed the smile.

“Alas, her incorruptible love of yore was arrowed by the fatality’s shot. Again cupid’s arrow came hot. I became a past, ignorable and with rot. She was now in another spring of love. Incipient love for the future in her womb, I was the past buried in a tomb. I thus became an orphan although my parents lived. After many cries and anguished, aimless flights bereaved, life’s burden with my soft feathers I heaved.  Young and handsome, I flew with time’s oblivion and balm. Intoxicating is youth’s charm,” the parrot paused.

There was a smile. The sparrow nodded knowingly.

“Inevitably I fell in love. Heartfully I cooed with my beautiful lady. Those love-drenched days when the heart was ever ready to sing an ecstatic ditty! Such abundance and happiness was in my kitty. So sweet, silent, mirthful and unencumbering were those acceptances of nuptial responsibilities. Those watchful, eager, searches for hollows in tree trunks for our nest. Tirelessly we looked around for the best,” the aroma of sweet memories raised the pal of gloom from the parrot’s face.

The sparrow beamed as if dabbing his old beak in the sea of happiness.

“Guided by the love’s brace, we found our place. In that comfortable, safe hole, nothing else but we had all the muse and role. Our identities melted into each other’s. How proud was I when I became a father!” the memory suffused the parrot with fresh gust of energy.

The parrot stood, flapped it wings and preened it fur with it luscious red beak. The sparrow too got onto its old claws and stretched his wings to unstiffen his body.

The parrot’s voice had a strained note now. “I will not become like my parents, I thought. I will not be ensnared like they were caught.”  

Some traces of that determination still seemed to raise his spirits for a moment. “So I clung to my possessions with youthful pride. Alas, the inevitability arrived with chide. In full bloom of youth and colours, whole of my brood flew away. My lady-bird came to be infatuated under someone’s cooing sway. It was another fine day when she bade adieu and flew away,” sorrows ran through the parrot’s fatigued, sleepless body.

The old sparrow too sighed and stretched his wings.

“I embodied all forlornness. The loss was glaring in my face. Monstrously unremedied! So I decided to leave that place. And my sulking wings did brace to take up the longest possible flight from the place where such pains and unfaithfulness abound. So flew I as if pursued by fearsome-most hound. For many days I have been flying, my soul aching and wings crying. I won’t stop till I reach the place where happiness is not checkmated by such tragedies,” the parrot looked outside through the opening.

“Why should we enter into something and love somebody so completely if it is bound to go into gutters? Isn’t all such temporary dives into life’s stream all futile and vain? Aren’t we just mere cogs in the hands of those inevitable, unstoppable machines of fate that make us cheat on each other, abandon the once loved ones and more?” the parrot had burning questions coming out of his aggrieved self.

The old sparrow, full of wisdom, the undisputed king of his life’s small kingdom, looked with solace and simplification of age. Perched safely where youth’s dilemmas and puzzles no longer haunt with their pinch and rage.

The sparrow said, “It’s like a flower ruing and ruminating over other blossoms because its beauty will not last forever and will go to the glooms. Dear, it’s not we who are the ends, rather the beautiful phenomena like love, marriage, procreation that decide the trends. We are just means to these beautiful ends and destinations. So become a tool uncomplaining, tilling earth without any expectations. It isn’t that love exists because we do love someone. Love is the primordial sea without any limits of space, time and individualities. It’s we who sweeten a few moments of life with it till the full stops arrive with a stopping hit. Do we procreate to cling to procreation throughout life? No, we are made to procreate to become unselfish means for the propagation, for handing over our batons, to perpetuate these beautiful phenomena of love and relationships. We do not leave behind an offspring, but a possible instrument which may come in handy for the sustenance and survival of those very precious moments that got us the taste of love, happiness and friendship at their best. If we recognise it, our spirit gets a solacing rest. If not, we get caught in an acrimonious net. We cry and put up a bet that I completely loved her and became the cause of young lives. It was I who caused that buzzing in those hives. But such limitations would have been meaningful had our survival been unlimited, or say our immortality was uninhibited. But our journeys are to be ended. So just cherish those moments that you tended. If you cling to this stream of these phenomena like these are your inheritance forever, they then become a drag around your neck, making you a prisoner behind the bars,” the sparrow stopped and jerked his fur as if trying to find some last trace of such bondage.

“Liberate fella, liberate yourself! Just be a journeyman who understands that young flowers on a plant, young soots on a twig do not lessen themselves or the spring in not ruing over their wispy autumnal fall. They inculcate phenomena. They help perpetuate nature. They sustain the amazing natural gifts of love, beauty and bloom. They also served in a similar way, made some new ray, very feeble though, to defeat some gloom in some shadows,” the oldie’s dull, watery eyes sparked with hope, with satisfaction, as lightening flashed and reflected in his eyes.

The parrot was at long last feeling the vibes of happiness and rest that comes with acceptance of simply doing the duty and completing the task with full heart.   

 “So the only way to remain happy is just to be happy, no matter what the circumstances are?” the parrot had his doubts.

The old host chuckled, tweeted and cleared his throat. The visitor was near the point, although still with his doubts, which was natural.

“Yaa just be happy, no water what!” the sparrow lowered his voice as if in cadence with a divine mantra.  “It’s basically we who repel happiness away from us. We don’t allow it to come to us, embrace us, take hold of us. We set it as a goal too far down the line in future. Some house, some grains, some accumulation of pleasure, some relationships, etc., etc. We set up goals as the preconditions for our happiness. And the goals keep on piling up, over the years, and set up a wall between us and happiness. And happiness keeps on getting more and more distant from us. I will set up a home and then be happy. Happiness delayed. And then I work over the years. There is no end. I set a goal to raise a family and then be happy. Again it sets up a wall between happiness and us. Like frustrated human log-movers, whom I see in the forest, we just push on. Happiness stays thus a distant goal. Never to be achieved. We make it conditional on endless goals, which are never met, because it’s the destiny of a goal to merge into another bigger one. They never die, only we die. Huge immortals they are. In pushing for them, we die. Separated from happiness that could have been the greatest gift of life, had we not pushed it away from us.”                                          

The long fabric of the stormy night was slowly melting over the banyan. Outside, stormy chilliness was fleeting before a promising twilight. Chances were there for a day bright. Clouds parted from the face of the sky. The parrot’s spirit’s appeared to cut through the shadows and soar high.

Holding onto the visitor’s traces of hope, the old host tweeted, “The remedy lies in taking away happiness from the far end of our endless goals and keep it safe in our house, like I do store some grains for the harsh winters, near me, in the safest part of my house. It has to be cut away from the trail of endless goals and ambitions and kept with the self, in the present. It has to be set free from any conditions of meeting some goal. It’s a state as good as being healthy. Living for a day. You can be happy if you set your happiness free from the chains of your lifelong dreams.”

The parrot smiled. It was the dawn of truth.

The wise oldie continued, “You should be pushing towards yours goals as a happy person, rather than somebody who wants to be happy in future after completing the goals. The goals never come to a halt, only we do, at the moment of our death. So we die unhappily, separated from the natural state of happiness that could have pumped our life with unthinkable contentment and satisfaction, only if we had set it free of the chains of goal-setting and placed it free from those unreachable spots in the future.”

The parrot stood erect like a disciple in front of his master.

The sparrow raised his voice as if carrying his old furred body over to the peak of realisation. “Let happiness be a precondition for our doings, not a poor outcome of our efforts. Happiness is a state of being so, not the specific result of some hot pursuit. There is only one way it can be availed. Either we embrace it in the condition we are in, or it just eludes. Keep it with you while you fly. It will boost your determination to fly high and far.” 

The sparrow was beaming with such rest and repose, as can be given by being happy unconditionally.

The peaceful oldie looked out with hope. “The day today will be warm and sunny. The dawn promises sweetest honey. Youngman, I’m in hurry to go out of my hole, and play my chirpy role in the great stage set around. My feeble soufflés and dim light in the eyes are enough even for the down-hilly afternoons.”

The parrot looked on happily, deeply drinking the sips of solace and comfort pervading the wood-hole.

“You go high because the forenoons are there for you with their multiple hues. Go, so that you don’t rue over the day aimlessly lost. Do justice to the old spirit of your host. Take some lessons from my soft feebleness. It will boost your courage. Take clues from the manner in which I make a day out of my night! And top of all, decide to be happy before you take flight!”

The old sparrow came to the parrot and patted him with his faded furred wing. The parrot lowered his head in gratitude for a great lesson taught. Thanking the host, the visitor flew away into those swathes of promise, where new life, new love, new aspirations and new relationships held sway. But all that was secondary, in future and to be worked upon. More importantly, he was happy in the present. He had decided to keep happiness as a routine, like eating fruits and flying.