Ranjit Lal writes: How a parrot aids a teenage romance

She’d made no mention of the heady kiss I had planted on her last evening — had she already forgotten it? Typical. I’d laid bare my heart and she hadn’t even seemed to have noticed it.

Swahili’s ‘airing’ was really an excuse for us to ‘debrief’ Mrs Kapur’s gorgeous African grey parrot of all the bad language he had picked up since his last debriefing, from Ramu and the other staff who worked at Mrs Kapur’s Animal Shelter, where we had been helping out for years. Also, he enjoyed looking up at the sky and screaming insults at the other birds.

“Ok Swahili, now tell us what you learned this week!” Sudha demanded, as I glared at her. She didn’t mention the kiss all evening, it was as if it had never happened.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sudha asked. “You hardly said a word all evening. Just grunted.”
“Uh-huh!”

It got worse, because I stopped talking to her and we stopped going up to the terrace until one evening, Mrs Kapur rang me.

“Lalit, I think Swahili is missing you and Sudha! He keeps calling out for you in his lovelorn voice and then swears like a pirate! Could you take him up this evening?”

“Sure aunty… umm, have you called Sudha?”

“Yes, she’s coming in about an hour…”

“Then I’ll come over right now! I have Algebra tuition after an hour!”
No way that I was going to be on the terrace with Sudha! She sucked!

I took Swahili up on the terrace, looking around morosely. Sudha and I had had such fun (and more) here… I glared at the parrot.

“Actually you’re so lucky, you know!” I blurted. “You live in a spacious aviary downstairs, you learn bad words, you eat, you sleep; you have no problems. Not like me!”
“Waark!” the parrot agreed wisely.

“Oh yes,” I told Swahili, thumping my chest gorilla style, “you see…that stupid Sudha! Like me Tarzan, Sudha Jane, only she don’t know it! Oh yes, Sudha is still tomboy, but such a beautiful one. Not very big boobies and bottom, but so beautiful ones…like…like spheres of heaven!”
“Boobies and bottom, spheres of heaven!” Swahili agreed.

“All this time she was just a fun girl and we had a good time. Then suddenly, she has boobies and bottom…she like nymph, sylph, pixie, elf, fairy, mermaid, angel. She’s curvaceous, slim, comely, shapely, sexy, frisky and all that!” I had spent an afternoon scanning the Thesaurus. “She is funny, crazy, dotty and I’m just nuts about her!”

“Waark…nuts about her,” Swahili agreed.

I stomped off downstairs after an hour. On the way down I met Sudha who had just arrived and wordlessly handed her the cage. I glanced back at her to find her sticking out her tongue at me.
Next day, Mrs Kapur rang again and said she’d like to talk to me and Sudha.
“There’s something I have to tell you both,” she said.

So, we found ourselves sitting next to one another in Mrs Kapur’s office, pointedly ignoring each other. Behind Mrs Kapur’s desk, Swahili regarded us from his big brass cage.
“Well dears, let me tell you what this is about… You know we have at last got some money — more than enough of it actually. So from henceforth, I’m going to give you both a stipend of five thousand rupees a month for all your help. You’ve both been invaluable and helped me for so many years!”
“Five thousand rupees?” We whispered together, and then looked in different directions. “Thank you aunty!”

“Waark!” Swahili said as if on cue. And then produced a sound of a gorilla thumping his chest. “Me Tarzan, Sudha Jane, only she don’t know it!” he went on mimicking me so well that Sudha stared at me open-mouthed. “Waark! She like nymph, sylph, elf, curvy, boobies and bottom, boobies and bottom, spheres of heaven!” the wretched bird went on. Mrs Kapur got a sudden fit of coughing.
“Waark — he’s not handsome-handsome, but gorilla-handsome!” Swahili suddenly averred in Sudha’s tearful voice, staring at her. He fixed his pale grey eyes on me.

“Like nymph, like sylph, like elf, like pixie, like frisky, nuts about her, nuts about her…” Then in Sudha’s voice: “Such a cute wiggly he has, wiggles and waggles like anything! I love it, I love it, I love him! Waarrk!”

At this point, Mrs Kapur got to her feet. Her shoulders were shaking and she was making funny snuffling sounds into her handkerchief.

“My allergies,” She gasped. “I think I’ll leave you kids to think about it.”
Sudha and I looked at each other.
“He’s a liar! He’s making it all up! I never said all that!” we both exclaimed together. “Swahili, shut up!”

“Boobies and bottom eh? Spheres of heaven?” Sudha repeated slowly getting to her feet and taking a peek at her bum.

“Gorilla-handsome? Gorilla-handsome?” I stood up.

A piercing wolf whistle speared through the room as Mrs Kapur popped her head around the door, smiled and quietly withdrew.

Ranjit Lal is an author, environmentalist and bird watcher