The other day my friend from Paris walked into the house with a huge surprise. She called out to me to come out into the garden. Rushing out the way I did and almost tripping over a flower pot, a very special surprise left me thinking and philosophizing for a few days more.

She had walked into the gate with a retinue of bird cages-each housing a parrot ! With one cage in hand she was escorted by another person who held the remaining five.

“My goodness!” I screeched with my hands over my head. “What on earth are you going to do with all these parrots?” She just looked at me with a mischievous smile like that of a child ready to play a trick on elders.

I literally stared in amazement and thought to myself, “It’s the excitement of a new country and new experience - it will wear off!! But why in the world would someone visiting Nepal for a brief period want this battalion?”

The person escorting her placed

the cages gently on the ground one

by one in a semicircle around my big old and gracious pear tree.

My other friend from Paris too was asked to come out. We were asked

to sit around and as both of them

recited a Buddhist prayer with folded hands and bent heads, I followed suit. It was only then that it dawned on me - the prayer was for the miserably trapped birds. This was a celebration of life and freedom.

Slowly she opened the cage

doors individually and the birds flew out — away and above the pine trees that line the garden wall !!

My friend’s expression was one of relief as if a burden she carried had eventually been laid to rest. I then understood why she did what she did. Born free!!! Freedom was their right. Snared into these wired metal cages, crouched in misery and fear, these birds were struggling to survive.

For the next few days I thought about this small incident and the act of simple kindness. I was reminded of a saying that I often heard as a child “Little things mean a lot”.

It also brought to my mind the words of Alvin Toffler-”....if whole stretches of one’s life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity....” Manmade complexities had vanished, and with the soaring birds, we too felt great to be alive.