Freedom

FREEDOM


It was about 7 am, an early weekday morning at Lawrence. As usual I headed to the kitchen to make tea. I put the water to boil and headed to the living room window. This big glass partition opens into the patio. Our apartment is on the ground floor. Beyond the patio is a patch of grass. Beyond the patch is the parking lot.

I usually get up earlier than my roommates and open the window blinds. Through the glass we can see people walk by. Above our patio is the balcony of our first floor neighbors. Neighbors, well...but we don’t know them. Sometimes, after a night of loud music, we find pieces of used napkins, cigarette stubs, pieces of pizza crusts that slip through and fall down into our patio. The balcony has wooden planks with wide gaps in between. I often secretly hoped to look up and find the neighbor girl standing on the balcony in a skirt. But like most fairy tales this never happened.

Anyway, as I opened the blinds, I caught some movement in the patio. There was a lump of furs, which bounced around moving very slowly. I was startled. In my semi-awake state I thought maybe some cigarette butts from the previous night party of our neighbors got entangled in a napkin and were moving with the breeze. Shaking off my sleep I peered closer and saw a small little bird-ling.

I am not an avian species identification expert, but I believe it was a sparrow. For the lack of better knowledge I would refer to her as a sparrow in what follows. She (or was it he?) was so small that I could hold her in my hands. She would be barely half the length of my palm. She had a very small beak, probably like quarter of a centimeter long. Her two small black little eyes stared at me intensely.

This was the first non-human life form, which had set foot in our apartment, although it was a rather illegal mode of entry. Our patio is about two feet wide and about five feet long. This birdie was sitting in the middle of the patio. I wondered what she was doing there and how she landed here to begin with.

I opened the window partition and moved towards her to look closer. She tried to run away from me in a strange way. She moved somewhat like a penguin. It reminded me of village women in India walking back from the well with a bucket on each arm- a gawky hurried sort of walk. She scurried away towards the far corner. I followed her and extended my hand. At the last moment it gave me a huge surprise and flew up ...but she couldn't actually fly more than a few inches in the air. But that was enough to carry her to the other far corner of the patio. I tried again. I reached closer and thought...there smart birdie...I finally have you cornered...but she flew away again.  I made a few more attempts. Every time it would scurry way and then make that last ditch desperate attempt and fly away....

If Al Pacino from the ‘Scent of a Woman’ could have watched this, I am sure he would say “Hoooah..." every single time in sheer excitement. But so it went...from corner to corner. I too was nervous about touching her as she was very fragile and afraid. The birdie flew from here to there and never allowed itself to be caught.

Soon after that I noticed that a bigger bird, obviously the mother sparrow, had perched itself nearby, on the top of the lampshade above the entrance to the apartment complex. She was intensely watching the on-goings. I withdrew back into the living room and waited. Soon the mother sparrow flew down from the lampshade top and descended on the grass beyond the patio wall. She moved nervously, moving her head in strange angular motions very rapidly up and down, left and right. One fascinating thing about birds is that they don’t have eyelids and move their heads in 360 angles. That graceful all round movement always seems amazing to me. She hopped closer to the patio wall and finally sat on the top of the wall itself.

The youngling made some intense sounds to call her. They were little voices that sounded like “tweak-tweak”. The mother repeated the rapid movements and made some responding sounds. I wish I knew the bird language. However it was clear that mother was saying, “Yes sweetheart, mama is here for you, but that human standing over there is freaking me out”. To the birds I must have seemed liked a mountain.

I stepped back further. The mama sparrow finally got the courage to descend down. Both the youngling and the mama made some huge noises.  The birdie must have been totally puzzled by what was going on. She was confused and frightened.

The mother –daughter duo chirped around for quite some time obviously trying to find a way out of the patio. But the little one was too small to fly past the wall. I too wondered how she would get out. I put some small breadcrumbs on the patio floor and left for school. In the evening, walking from the parking lot back to the apartment I found the little one was still there. The breadcrumbs had disappeared.

Soon after that my roommates came back too. My roommates found a yellow metallic cart loader near our apartment complex office. We pulled that into the patio. We tried to somehow guide the birdie so that she could jump on the metallic rails one after the other. She did manage to jump up the bottommost rail. But couldn’t do more than that. The other level was almost a foot higher. She tried a couple of times. But failed. She seemed exhausted and withdrew back into the corner, scared, making the “chee-chee” sound. We were at a loss. It was getting dark. We were not sure what to do. We put some breadcrumbs, and water in a small saucer and left.

Next morning, she was still there. All of us are graduate students. We left for our classes. In the evening we noticed a ladder around the trash-bin area. Its steps were wider and the distance between the steps was shorter. It seemed like the ladder that would be used in a double decked bed. We lowered that into the patio and waited for the birdie to try jump on it. Pretty soon, she hopped on to the first level. We cheered. After flitting around nervously on the first wooden plank she finally mustered courage to hop on to the next level. She tried. But she could barely touch the next plank, lost balance and fell down. After a while she would start again from the first one. This happened a few times. She was quite young, perhaps just a few days old. She was way out of her league in trying to jump higher. This was her traumatic introduction to the realities of the world. The mama sparrow kept coming in and out of the patio. She was visibly tense and at distinct unease. She ate the breadcrumbs. But perhaps this sudden food security was of little comfort for her.

Another day passed.

Third day, I was in the living room. I happened to notice some boxes. In the true bachelor fashioned cleanliness, we had just left them there. Some were computer boxes; others had come with boom boxes, CD players etc. And it suddenly struck me. We piled the boxes in a vertical fashion. The second box was slightly pushed back from the edge of the first box. That left a little room. The third box was similarly pushed back a little from the edge of the second box. We had six or seven small boxes in all. The top of the last box was a few inches away from the patio wall top. This time we looked on in real anticipation. We cheered our birdie noisily. Some neighbors came down to see what the drama was all about. They also joined in the cheering. This time our birdie jumped and hopped easily as there was little gap between boxes-just a few inches. Soon she reached the topmost box. We had the image of Neil Armstrong walking on moon, taking the first step on moon-a giant leap for the humankind. And then our birdie did it too!! She leaped across the wall- into her freedom.

The real story, though, had just begun. At this time I had been going through problems in my own life. The strangest part was to come in the days and months to follow. And it continues till this day. There have been many times after that when I have been absorbed in gloomy thoughts about life. They were of fear, of doubt. The first time it seemed a sheer coincidence. I happened to look up and found a sparrow hopping around the patio wall. I can’t say if it was the one we had helped rescue. But it lifted my spirits. If a small, frail, weak sparrow had flown past a high wall, I too could climb out of my walls. A sparrow has come many times at the right time after that. I no longer believe this to be a coincidence.

It seems like there are planes of existence beyond our limited rational minds. Somehow those realms sense my despondency. And in an odd way, a sparrow brings back the message that I had once helped give to one of their kind- the message of hope, of courage, of redemption. Perhaps that is just their way of expressing their gratitude. Even after you have failed and fallen repeatedly, they seem to say, keep jumping up and higher-towards freedom.