Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(62)
Every evening he came cycling down Multan Road, trilling the bell on his bicycle, which was laden with birdcages and wicker baskets. The baskets brimmed with candles, lice combs, fans, attar bottles, incense, and other household items. The bird man was a short, thin man, and very clumsy—I can’t tell you how many times we helped him pick up dropped merchandise, cages, even his turban. His turban was large and sequined with a starched turra at the top. Many times we saw him in clothes with holes in them—once he even circled the neighborhood barefoot—but we never saw that turra unstarched, even if his awkwardness meant we frequently glimpsed his long, beautiful, well-oiled hair, which would have suited our own heads so well, we thought.
The bird man would stop under a peepal tree near the entrance of the orphanage. Grinning, he’d get off the bicycle and spread a wool shawl on the ground. He’d set his cages down and begin twittering. He could whistle, warble, chirrup, cheep, and caw as well as any bird he carried, startling new customers and delighting old.
He followed this musical prologue with a show displaying his birds’ impeccable training in divination.
The bird man sold all manner of bird: parrots, pigeons, bank mynahs, Australian lovebirds (his hottest item), but there were two he wouldn’t part with—a pair of green rose-necked parakeets. These parakeets had mastered the art of soothsaying. They fluttered impatiently in a painted blue wooden cage, while the bird man fanned out a stack of white envelopes on the shawl. The envelopes had gilded borders, and soaring birds, dulled by time and use, were embossed in the corners.
Curious customers, many of them prematurely aged women, would come up and look. Shy at first, they would slowly gather courage, put out their hands for examination, and pose their questions:
Will I ever get married? Will my firstborn be a boy? Will that please my husband? My mother-in-law wants more dowry and loathes me. What should I do?
and
Should I stay away from the gas stove in the kitchen?
We girls would gather around the bird man as he frowned and took their hands. His fingernails were long and manicured, and softly they traced the lines on the women’s palms. He had a comforting smell about him, like earth, or bird, or the way my hands smelled after rolling dough peras on the nights it was my turn to bake roti. He spoke gently to the women, whispering, calming their nerves.
Only then would he lift the door of the blue cage, letting one of the parakeets hop out.
The bird would pace back and forth across the envelopes. It nipped and pecked at them, its small head darting, until finally it gripped an envelope’s edge. It would lift it in its beak and prop it against its emerald body. The bird man would take the envelope, extract the piece of paper inside, pop a tablet of sweet choori into the parakeet’s beak, and read the prophecy to the wide-eyed customer.
He was never wrong, the women said. So many before him were charlatans, they said. Their eyes glowed when they said it and the bird man’s admirers grew and grew.
My sisters and I were his admirers as well. Sangeeta Apa would watch him from the entrance, the end of her cotton dopatta caught between her teeth. He would laugh with us and tell us our fortunes for free. Sometimes he teased Apa, “Whoever you marry will become a king among men.” Often he would give us gifts: bird-shaped candles he’d designed, vials of cheap attar, bottles of scented rubbing oil. He was a good man, we thought. Wise and ageless.
Sometimes after the Rishtay Wali Aunty had been by, we would ask him to tell us the would-be bride’s future. Always he refused.
“Palm lines and the paths of heavenly bodies are malleable. Hard work, prayer, love—they can reshape them,” he would say. “Take care of your families and all will be well.”
We wanted to believe him and sometimes we did, but, even at that age, we knew better. The orphanage was our father and mother. Beyond its walls, who knew?
The walls of the orphanage were dun-colored.
I remember this even if I have forgotten other things—the face of the old pastor who came tottering down the courtyard on Sundays; the smell of trees that lined the courtyard (which trees? I remember orange and red mulberry, but which one at the courtyard’s end by Sangeeta Apa’s room that cast a long, shocked shadow); the color of the bird man’s turban, the sequins of which flared red as he pedaled his bicycle down Multan Road at dusk. Strange how we drown in recollection at the least propitious of times but cannot pluck memories from the past’s branches when we need them.
Sangeeta Apa.
No end or beginning to some tales, but middles are always there. She was the middle of all our stories, the center sitting still and somber when everyone around her rode, quickly or sluggishly, the tide of time in the orphanage. Days and weeks and months and years—the Rishtay Wali Aunty’s arrival marked them and whittled them away. Thirty-six girls of all ages. So many marriages and migrations. So many of my sisters came and went, yet Sangeeta Apa remained, braiding our hair, peeling mangoes, husking peas and walnuts, dyeing Bibi Soraiya’s hair with henna (the smell of that henna, rich and secret, like a sunset glimpsed from a crevice under the canal bridges); and as we giggled and ran around the courtyard, singing songs
We are a flock of sparrows, Father
One day we will fly away
Sangeeta Apa would shake her head and laugh, the sound ringing out loud and shrill and mysterious, until its final notes couldn’t be told from the twilight birdsong.
It was a very long time before the Rishtay Wali Aunty came for her. By then Apa was in her forties, half her head silvered with age.