THE CAGE THAT LOVED

The window stayed closed the next morning.

Not because my mother asked for it again, but because nobody thought to open it.

That is how certain things begin inside families. Quietly. Without announcement. A curtain pulled once for comfort slowly becomes the natural shape of the room. And after a while, nobody remembers there was once light falling differently on the walls.

A few weeks later, my son brought home two lovebirds.

He carried them carefully with both hands, as though joy itself could spill if tilted too quickly. Their cage was too bright for our house. Blue bars. Tiny mirrors. Wooden swings. Small bowls shaped like flowers. The kind of colours childhood trusts without hesitation.

“They were lonely in the shop,” he told me.

And I nodded, because children always believe love means bringing something closer.

The birds adjusted quickly. Faster than I expected.

Within days they had memorised the geography of the cage. Which corner held food. Which swing moved less. Which side caught the evening light. They moved around each other with the comfort of creatures who had never been separated long enough to become individuals.

Every morning before school, my son would stand near them and speak softly.

“Good morning, X and O.”

And they would chirp back as if language was simply a matter of trying hard enough.

I began watching them more than I admitted to anyone.

Not continuously. Not intensely. Just in fragments. While passing by. While drinking tea. While standing in the kitchen waiting for rice to cook. The kind of watching women do all their lives without appearing to observe anything at all.

Sometimes they looked beautiful to me.

Sometimes they looked familiar.

There is a certain kind of childhood that resembles a decorated cage. From outside, it appears perfect. Everything arrives before you even know you need it. Water before thirst. Food before hunger. Protection before danger. The world enters your life filtered through the fears of people who love you deeply and fear the world even more deeply.

I had that kind of childhood.

Cold rooms. Clean bedsheets. Adults who measured love through maintenance. Nobody forgot my birthday. Nobody forgot to ask if I had eaten. Nobody forgot to remind me to be careful.

But somewhere between all that remembering, they forgot to leave a little wilderness inside me.

I never cycled on crowded roads. Never returned home with muddy knees. Never learnt how to look strangers in the eye for too long. Fear was inherited softly in our homes, folded carefully inside concern.

Don’t go alone.
Don’t trust too much.
Don’t stay out late.

Especially for girls, caution arrived early. Long before confidence did.

And because it was given with love, nobody questioned it.

One evening, while cleaning the cage, my son forgot to shut the small door properly.

I noticed it first.

The opening was tiny, almost polite. Not dramatic enough to call freedom, but enough for escape to exist.

“Look,” I told him quietly.

His face brightened immediately.

“They can fly now.”

The certainty of children is frightening sometimes. They think ability and readiness are the same thing.

We both stood there waiting.

One of the birds slowly moved toward the opening. Its claws touched the edge carefully. It looked outside for a long moment, its body completely still except for the nervous movement near its throat.

Then it stepped back inside.

“That’s strange,” my son laughed lightly.

But I did not laugh.

Because suddenly the room felt crowded with people I had known all my life.

Girls who topped classes but could not confidently order food in restaurants. Boys who were never allowed to fail once and collapsed completely the first time life refused them something. Adults who spent forty years inside emotional cages and renamed it responsibility.

Nobody speaks enough about preparedness.

The child who is never allowed to cross the road alone grows into an adult terrified of crossings. The child protected from every disappointment eventually meets one heartbreak and believes life itself has ended.

We raise human beings like porcelain idols and then act shocked when they break under ordinary weather.

The bird stood near the opening once again.

Outside the cage, rain had begun falling softly against the buildings. Vehicles passed below. Somewhere in another home pressure cookers whistled. Somewhere a mother was calling her child home before dinner.

The world was continuing normally.

But inside that small cage, a decision larger than the bird itself was waiting to happen.

“You can go,” my son whispered this time.

The bird looked outside again.

And I realised something then that stayed with me long after the room had gone dark.

Maybe love is not what keeps someone close.

Maybe love is what makes leaving possible without fear.

The bird did not fly that day.

It slept beside the opening instead, its tiny body turned toward a world it did not understand yet.

Later that night, after everyone had slept, I walked back into the kitchen. Rain tapped gently against the closed windows. The house had become quiet in the way homes do after carrying people all day.

And suddenly, without warning, I thought about Aayi.

The woman who raised me.

Not my mother by blood, but in every other way the body understands motherhood.

I was born Malayalee, but before I learnt Malayalam properly, I learnt her Marathi. My first comforts arrived in that language. My first scoldings. My first lullabies. Even today, certain kinds of love still return to me sounding like Marathi spoken from a tired kitchen at dusk.

As a child, I never questioned it.

I thought mothers were simply the women whose voices entered your sleep first.

Aai would feed me with her hands while telling stories between mouthfuls, pausing only to shout at the pressure cooker, the neighbour’s child, or the milk threatening to spill over. She moved through life with that strange softness working women carry, exhaustion hidden inside routine so deeply that the world mistakes it for strength.

And when you grow up watching women like that, something happens inside you.

You begin admiring their endurance before you understand their loneliness.

You begin mistaking sacrifice for love. Silence for maturity. Exhaustion for responsibility.

And slowly, without noticing, you begin preparing yourself to become the next version of them.

Some of the most beautiful women I have known were also the most emotionally caged.

 Some by cruelty. Some by violence. Some by duty. Some by love. By fear inherited so gently it no longer looked like fear at all.

And somewhere between her Marathi and my mother’s Malayalam, and my Grandparent’s between Mumbai and Kerala, between protection and distance, between being held too closely and not understanding the world enough, I became who I am.

Not fully one thing. Not fully another. Perhaps that is why the bird stayed with me.

Because some cages are not made from iron.

Some are made from language. From love. From women who did their best. From childhoods that looked beautiful from outside.

And the frightening part is this, you realize that you too have become that Love Bird.

When you grow up around these lovely, exhausted women long enough, you slowly begin becoming the next Amma, the next Aai.

You inherit their tenderness. Their caution. Their habit of surviving quietly.

And after a point, even if the cage door remains open, you no longer leave.

Not because you cannot. But because you have been tamed gently enough to mistake the cage for home. That was the part that frightened me most. Not the cage itself.

But how beautifully love can decorate it.

And yet, somewhere deep inside me, beyond fear, beyond routine, beyond inherited caution, I have always believed there is another world beyond this ordinary one.

A world unseen for me and my family.

A world where love does not shrink people in order to protect them. Where care does not become control. Where tenderness can exist without fear standing beside it.

Perhaps love, too, can exist, without becoming a cage.

“Bol Aayi, Bol,” she would tell me when I was barely one and a half years old, leaning closer with a patience only certain women possess, repeating the word again and again as though the entire world had narrowed itself down to that one moment. And when I finally said “Aayi,” the joy in her eyes was not the joy of being addressed, it was the quiet fulfilment of a love that had found a place to live forever.