AN ENQUIRY INTO THE MORPHOLOGY OF ATTACHMENT

Once upon a time, there lived a woman who loved her pet very much. Her pet was a beautiful bird of unspecified species that she kept in a cage, and not just any cage but a big, spacious, golden cage full of all the amenities a bird could ask for. It had several interesting swings, a chime for the bird to play with, an Xbox 560 with apps for avians, and even a 3D hologram of the sky designed to make the bird feel it was mid-flight – just so it wouldn’t miss the sky, being a bird and all. 

While the bird seemed mostly content, with all its needs taken care of, it was subject to sudden, inexplicable bouts of sadness, phases when it refused to chirp to its owner, refused to eat, refused to occupy its customary perch on its favourite red rhino-headed hoop, and instead sank onto its belly on the cage floor, its body all hunched up into itself. Even the owner’s declarations that she loved it very much – she said ‘I love you’ to the bird at least eighteen times a day, on average – could not stir it out of its catatonic stupor.

The bird’s owner was distressed by these mood swings. She took her pet to a bird psychiatrist. The bird psychiatrist found nothing wrong with the bird. ‘This is a normal, healthy bird,’ said the bird psychiatrist. ‘Some exercise is all it needs. That should take care of its mood swings.’ 

The bird’s owner, who loved the bird very much, took two days off from work to hunt for a suitable treadmill for the bird. She finally found one in an antique shop in the old part of the city. The shopkeeper told her it once belonged to the city’s circus.

The treadmill was duly installed in the cage. The bird, though initially uninterested in the treadmill, took to it after some coaxing from the owner. Walking on the treadmill was at least a novel experience compared to walking around in circles. 

It is the nature of novelty, however, to wear off. The bird’s sadness returned in a few months. The owner spent a lot of time talking to the bird. She believed that the bird felt lonely. She thought if she spent more and more time talking to it, the bird could be yanked out of its bad moods. The bird listened patiently to her owner’s words, never chirping anything much in return.

One day, as the owner was again telling the bird how much she loved her, how much the bird means to her, what a beautiful bird the bird was, how its presence lit up the owner’s life, and gave it meaning, the bird interrupted her. The bird said to its owner, in its own bird language – but a language her owner had by now come to understand, more or less – it said to her owner, ‘You say that you love me, but is love supposed to be a golden cage, where the bird’s existence is defined by its being a source of joy for its owner?’

The owner was completely thrown by this question. While she could understand, she did not have the laryngeal resources to speak the bird’s language. Plus she had her own fears to contend with, as she had by now constructed her entire life around her pet. The owner tried to pretend not to understand what the bird was chirping to her in response to her words of love. But her instant reaction to the bird’s question – the way the expression on her face changed – gave the lie to her attempted pretension. The bird, with typical animal intuition, knew, and she knew the bird knew, that she had understood her pet’s reasonable, if devastating, query.

Every time the owner came to the cage to coo her usual sweet nothings to the bird – what the bird now recognized as ‘bird talk’ essentially, though not something to be dismissed as meaningless, or without significance as a gesture of love and connection – the bird posed to her the same question: ‘Is love supposed to be a golden cage, where the bird’s existence is defined by its being a source of joy for its owner?’

The owner, who loved the bird very much, began to get anxiety attacks every time she approached the cage. Her pulse rose, her palms got clammy, her mouth turned dry, beads of sweat formed on her upper lip. Her body trembled every time the bird, which she loved to pieces, broached the subject of flight.

Words failed her as she tried to give a form and a shape to her fears, fears she was too ashamed to articulate even to herself: What if her pet flew away and did not come back – would it not then signify that what she had liked to imagine till date as her ‘love’ was anything but for the bird? What would she do then with an empty cage hanging in her room? Who will chirp to her every morning? Who would she speak to every evening if not to her little bird, her baby?

The bird was an intelligent bird. It slowly began to understand, from the facial expressions and behaviour patterns of its owner, and from the mismatch between its owner’s words and her actions, that though she meant well, she simply had no conception of flight, and no clue about the existential significance of flight for a bird with wings.

Flight, the bird concluded, can never mean as much to its owner as it did to the bird itself – not to mention, of course, that flight would mean even more to a caged bird than it would to a ‘free’ or ‘uncaged’ one. The bird did not doubt for a moment that its owner loved it, and loved it more than anyone else in her life. The irony was that though she loved the creature only because it was a bird – a creature defined by the possession of wings, a creature defined by the idea of the capacity for flight – the flight of her loved one was something she could not countenance, for the simple reason that the love whose recipient the bird was, was the love of someone who could never fly. Hands are limbs, yes, but not wings.

The bird, which also loved its owner a lot, was pained by the effect its question had on the owner. So, seeing its owner’s sad, tear-choked face day after day, the bird thought, if my owner’s happiness depends so much on me living my entire life within a cage, what’s wrong in finding meaning in a life without flight?

After all, not all birds are meant to fly. Maybe, thought the caged bird, I am only a Kiwi bird that thinks it’s an eagle or a nightingale just because it found itself in a cage. If I had grown up in the wild, I would know what I was: a bird that cannot fly. Who knows, perhaps my wings are not the kind to produce flight. Who knows, even if my owner sets me free, all I’d be able to do is hop about vainly, and comically, before realizing she had been right all along – I am not meant for flight. What I am born for is not flight but love. I should be happy that I have a golden cage and an owner who truly loves me. 

But all its rationalizations notwithstanding, the bird could not totally kill the nagging doubt: what if it could really fly? What if it was a swallow, a bird that could not just fly, but navigate oceans? 

The years passed, the caged bird grew older. As it grew older, its doubts lost their potency. Its dreams of flight atrophied. And then, one monsoon day, it was perched in its cage, gazing absent-mindedly at the window it had never flown out of. Perhaps it was wondering what rain drops felt like – did they sting as they fell on outstretched wings? Did they tickle? Or did they produce pleasurable sensations as they turned to water and trickled away? As the bird was musing thus, its unseeing eyes fixed on a branch outside the window, a magnificent bird swooped down from the sky and alighted gracefully on that very branch, on the very spot the bird had been staring at.

The caged bird was stunned to see this beautiful creature – they had the exact same plumage, were the same colour, the same size, and when it sang, its notes sounded exactly like the bird’s own. 

That evening when the bird’s owner came home from work, she could sense, even as she turned the key in the lock, that something was amiss. Missing was the anticipatory pitter-patter that greeted her when she reached the door.

Her heart pounding, she undid the latch with unsteady hands. She rushed to the room where the cage was. Her worst fears had come true: the cage was open. It was empty. Her little bird had taken flight. 

As she moved toward the cage, she felt something crunch underfoot. She looked down. It was the body of her loved one. Her little bird had attempted to fly – without telling her, without asking her. But its useless wings could not bear its weight, could not carry it out of the room even. It had fallen like a terrestrial, heavily, clumsily, on the hard, unexpected floor. A bird killed by flight. For a fraction of a second, the caged one had tasted flying, even if it was only falling. 

The owner picked up the limp body of the bird, now finally out of the cage. She carried the body to the terrace of her house, nearly tripping on the stairs at one point. Up there, on the rooftop, the owner of the bird contemplated the sky, her rival. It was the sky which had snatched her loved one from her, enticed it with promises of flight.

The owner of the bird turned away from the sky, her eyes shut in a tight scream. When she looked down, her tears traversed several stories and came to rest on a small patch of earth, darkening it just a little.