The Bird of Paradise Only Pecks the Hand of an Idiot

Or

I Hate Parrots

It was one of those weekends, you know, where you appreciate the fact that you can enjoy the night without having that cold realization that you’re going to have to go home early and sit down to glare at the ghastly textbooks filled with useless garbage that  only sadists can write and course book toting professors can understand. At any rate, I was elated. The exams were over, the new James Franco movie was out, and right now, a delicious dinner of lasagna oozing with tomato sauce and mozzarella was awaiting me at Pizza Hut. As a result, I didn’t even bothering listening to the rumble my stomach gave when my brother suggested a detour to a nearby pet store. Entertainment before dinner.

Consequently, I found myself in a small, but bright pet shop, with gleaming white walls and cute wall-hangings. It was filled with cages that housed white rats and hamsters that resembled those small, warm, butter-colored cookies you’ d find in a prosperous supermarket in Oman, sniffing at the cage door or cozily burrowing in a bale of straw and snoozing away peacefully (how I envied them!). In the corner of the shop was a storeroom with a glass door,where miserable puppies lay in their respective pens, their tails barely wagging when they saw us and their round, brown eyes full of unspeakable longing and suffering. Trying to curb the impulse to wrench open the door, grab a handful of heart-wringing, furry sweetness and vamoose, I turned to the man behind the counter, and found a beautiful Sulphur-crested cockatoo perched on his arm.

It cocked its head at the people gazing at it, allowing its bright-yellow crest, almost insolently curved at the end, to dip gracefully at the side of its pristine white head. Everybody oohed and aahed as they tentatively stroked its lovely plumage, while it clicked its shiny black bill impatiently.

I watched, as the man offered the bird his finger. It began nibbling the end of the fingernail gently, almost affectionately.  Thoroughly fascinated, I extended my finger, and was overjoyed when it began doing the same to me.

‘Look, Ma!’ I cried, gesturing wildly at her. ‘The bird likes me!’ Later, when I looked back at what happened after that, I realized that calling it a “bird” was probably not the best thing to have done just then. The cockatoo, after all, seemed like a feathery egotist- His Highness probably did not appreciate being given a common, lowdown name like “bird”.

Anyway, I turned back to the bird. The nibbling increased in fervor. Lulled by the rather pleasant sensation, I missed the baleful glare the cockatoo gave me, and the next moment, it clamped down on my finger, boring a hole with its sharp beak.

I let out a yell that had the lifeless dogs howling for the dead, the fish bumping into each other in their tanks and the little guinea-pigs squeaking with terror in their baskets. ‘Ow-ow-ow-ow! Lemme go, you stupid excuse for a parrot!’ This had the cockatoo biting my finger again, and the owner finally had to yank it away from me, lest I broke one of the window panes with my sonic screams of pain.

Nursing my poor finger, which was spouting so much blood that it looked like Old Faithful at Yellowstone Park, I was ushered out of the store by my parents who were laughing so hard (my own flesh and blood, no less!) that they were bent double, my brother who had gone into hysterics at the sight of the blood-filled crater in my finger, and an extremely apologetic shop owner (who promised a 25% discount on all pet birds if we ever wanted to buy any. I was never coming near his store again, let alone contemplate buying anything from it).

As I was sat down in my car, with assurances of Band-Aids (I loved Band-Aids with Winnie the Pooh patterns) and rocky-road ice-cream positively melting with chocolate sauce and marshmallow, I turned back and narrowed my eyes at the cockatoo. It stared back very innocently for a second, and then turned its back on me, but I could have sworn, if the door of the store had opened just a little wider, that I’d heard a very distinctive, rasping chuckle.