By Neeru Nagarajan

My parrot flew away one evening when the sun was a distant clementine I could reach out and cup with my palm. My mother took him to the terrace where the tiles burned your feet and, pointing to the crows, said, “Look, that’s how birds fly.”

When my parrot first came to me a long time ago, he was a quivering baby, looking like a fistful of plucked chicken. His red beak was the only big thing about him. My brother told me he would grow with a collar around his neck, a gift only to the males of the species. I fed him a diet of mush with a syringe until he learned how to walk to me and climb up on my finger. My finger was a candy cane with the red, diagonal slashes from his claws.

For years, every time I remembered him, they bled anew.

In my family you feel okay as long as you look okay. When I mourned the bird that had never seen the outside of home before, my mother said, “Don’t cry,” and handed me the long sandalwood talc shaker.

But if I asked my mother why she lost the bird, she always cried before I could. Under layers of caked powder, you can also hide your guilt.

I imagined the crows flapping their wings alongside my parrot, coaching him, teaching him about taking off and landing. “This is how you leave your nest,” they must have told him. Maybe they showed him how to return, and my parrot forgot that “open sesame” was the password for both ways. Maybe they showed him his home, but he rejected the idea, now that he had discovered that he could fly deeper into the blue without running into a wall for days.

I fed broken biscuits to crows—the same sly birds that taught my parrot to fly away from home but knew to return to their own nests every day. Sometimes the crows hopped up to me and ate from my palm. I let them. I let them dig their talons into my palms until the dents grew into fiery blooms.

Frequently, I walked out of my home without crumbs or pebbles and hoped I’d forget the way back. When I was outside, I looked over my shoulder a lot.

Sometimes, I dreamed that my parrot found his way back home. In my dreams, he returned, and we forgot all about the one time he wished to be away. We forgot that maybe he did not want to be one of us. He came back, and we accepted him. In my dreams, we knew how to forgive.