Blessed one

The parrot kept on hurling abuses at no one in particular. It looked like he was having a nervous breakdown. He choked a squawk and bit his feather. He tried to smash his head on the bars of his jail. He threw the plate of rice. Our gardener said he had likely seen a cat or a snake. You see, fear evokes rush.

So he was brought out of his 'safe' locker and placed on the empty bed, nudged by soft pillows. His master was my grandfather. The bed belonged to my father. And this said parrot was the ‘Master of arts of expletives’.

I wasn’t born in a room of running ladies, hot water buckets, a single light bulb, a squeaking bed and a shrieking lady. Unlike my father, I was born in a room of qualified doctors, ticking machines, LEDs, operation table and a sedated lady.

It was a lava hot day of summer glory. Grandfather was out in the verandah waiting for his first heir. He sipped his tea nervously and wiped the sweat on his forehead. He couldn’t dare to look at the room of running ladies. He had started resenting it at the face of his third stillborn. He didn’t hope, he didn’t pray. The sounds of hollowness kept on striking his ears. But the silence of his third made him deaf.

This time he had prepared himself for the worst. But fate had something else in mind .It offered him a bird.

The parrot came flying, navigating its way through the veins of the banyan tree . It sat on the boundary wall and told grandfather to go fuck himself!

Grandfather was taken aback. But then the parrot didn't care for it's actions and went away fluttering its wings at the sound of crying.

The baby's throaty cry.

Grandfather’s happiness knew no limits. He invited the whole village for supper, organized a ceremony for naming the little baby and most importantly bought a parrot and a cage.

The rural people were fascinated by the story of the miraculous parrot. The village head then decided that grandfather would teach the parrot all kinds of curses. And the villagers would come to be 'blessed' by his expletives to 'bring fortune' in their lives.

No sooner had the education of the parrot started that ;

A fucker solved disputes with his in-laws.

A pigmouth cleared his debts.

A hindlicker sent his children to study out of town.

The parrot became a star. But my father didn’t like it in particular. He believed that he should have been the one with the limelight. He was the one who broke the chain of stillborns. He emerged to be the strongest of all the womb residents. And here was the parrot, the one captured by a hunter from the tentacles of forest and sold for twenty bucks. He didn’t deserve to be so popular.

No less to speak of, grandfather was unaware of my father’s disapproval of parrot’s fame.

My father once, when he was a teenager, plotted to kill the parrot. He picked a stone, big enough to smash a parrot size head, and went near to his cage.

It is an irony that this fortune-bearer parrot was unfortunate enough to be caged. His cage overlooked the lawn from where he would supervise the gardener’s work and whistle to the onlookers.

My father tiptoed to the lawn when the gardener retired for a lazy afternoon. The parrot was finching away the itch in his wings. He peeked up at father through the bars and twisted his head sideways . Father peered down at him. The bubbling voice of his sanity spurted a tinge of guilt in his heart. He saw the reflection of the aftermath in parrot's tiny pearls. But the devil on his shoulder tamed the killer in him and lured him to open the gates of his fame.

For a second, my father didn’t want to kill him. He was the reason for many people’s happiness. His possibly-to- be- bloodied fingers wouldn’t even touch the cage.

Father was in a trance when the parrot's eye caught the falcon party gliding across the velvet blue sky, going home after a messy schedule.

The parrot blinked thrice and being the miraculous himself, threw a trail of abuses at my father from the safety of his confinement . Moron, blood sucker, asshole, pig face………

The village folks came out of their houses to get a sight of the ‘blessed’ one. Everyone was astonished at the fact that the parrot ,being a scrooge, never gave more than one abuse to an individual. The master’s son was lucky enough to extract the blessing from the parrot.

Father's future was already shining like an undiscovered mine of precious gemstones.

Soon father went on to win scholarship to a school abroad. All credits went to parrot. Father became an important person of an institution. All credits went to parrot. Father got married to mother who herself was an epitome of excellence . All credits went to parrot.

And then I was born.

Not long after my parents nurtured disputes between them and filed for divorce. And people said it was their personal problem. The luck had washed out by now. The blessings existed till this time.

My father came back to the village for recreation and he died of cardiac arrest. "He was born with blessings of a parrot , wouldn't he die without them? ", was a general perception. That day people say he had spent some quality time with the parrot; he taught him abuses in foreign language. He fed him a red chilly and kissed his forehead. A foe was coddled and amends were made.

I and my mother were called for the last rites. We had said our goodbyes before but this was the final time.

Two days after, the parrot turned ferocious. He stopped giving blessings. He stopped eating. He stomped on the iron floor in anger.

The house was crowded like fish eggs in ocean; with the villagers who were curious to get a glimpse of the wish fulfiller parrot descending into madness.

He was taken out of the cage. They placed him on father’s cold bed . My grandfather ordered us all to leave the room and to let the parrot moan in peace.

‘You shit!’, was the last thing we heard before closing the door.

The evening that day, he was gone.

He flew away. I trust that the last abuse was a blessing for himself.