The whistling she learnt from "Pathrows," our new newspaper boy. The first day he delivered the newspaper ('pathram' in Malayalam), he whistled shrilly and threw it from the gate. It hit Anna on the head. My father didn't shout at him. Instead, he named him "Pathrows" (pathram + throws). Incidentally, Pathroes is a common Christian name in Kerala and the boy being a pious Hindu didn't like it. Unfortunately for him, everybody in our neighbourhood hated his early morning ear piercing "twee … tweet" so they also began to call him Pathrows. He swore revenge on Anna. For a week he delivered the paper late. My father caught him on the eighth day and demanded an explanation.

"Ende ammekku pani pidichu," he said. ("My mother caught a cold.")

At once Anna sang "Pathrows inde ammekku pani pidichu." We saw the boy's face change colour and were thrilled to bits. We sang the catchy ditty every time we saw him which was at least twice a day since he worked in his father's tea shop near our house. We sang it on the way to school and we sang it coming back. Our friends learned it, taught it to their friends who taught it to theirs till finally all the children who went past the tea shop sang Anna's song loudly and in chorus. The fellow squirmed and massaged his head since his father knuckled him every time he heard it.

Pathrows swore greater revenge on us. If at every house, he whistled once "twee … tweet," at my house he kept whistling till someone shouted at him to shut up. Psitta who scratched her head with curled claws when I seated her on my finger and repeated "Pretty Polly" till my tongue twisted and the "Pretty Polly" became "Potty Prilly," learnt the whistle the moment she heard it. She rolled it over her tongue, liked it and kept at it more piercingly than Pathrows himself. Her whistling got on everybody's nerves and she made Pathrows a very happy man. The brighter side of this was that I won the bet with my brothers that Psitta was neither a birdbrain nor deaf and dumb. They had to clean my school shoes for a week.

Psitta learnt to say "Cheechu, padi da" or "Cheechu, study" (Tamil) from my uncles, aunts, grandparents, manni, older cousins and other killjoys. They believed that children were born to study but we knew that we were born to climb trees, build tree houses, walk on stilts, breed fish, cuddle animals and, if there was any time left in the day, dust a school book, cut the joined pages and try to make sense of its contents. The last was the most difficult for the day would have been very long indeed and the words would blur before our eyes. However, we had mastered the art of sleeping while sitting with the book in hand and our eyes open but Cheechu needed to rest his little head. The moment his head fell on the book, a wet blanket would come along and say, "Cheechu padi da!"

Sitting on my shoulder, Psitta learnt not only to say "Cheechu padi da" but repeated the "padi da" for good measure and followed it up with a riotous cackle that woke all of us up. That, more than her order, made Cheechu throw the book at Psitta. It would miss her and hit me so I would hit him back, my siblings would jump to separate us and we would end up in a heap on the floor.

Of all her vocal abilities, Psitta liked to laugh the most. Our neighbour, Mrs. D's voice dripped honey when she sang but her laughter erupted goose bumps on the listener. No words can describe how the chortle slipped under the skin, crept through the veins, numbed the senses and, at the climax, made the hair on our arms stand. The cackle caught Psitta's fancy and she learnt to reproduce it so realistically that we sometimes thought Mrs. D lived in our house and not in hers.

Psitta's rendition of Pathrows' whistle and Mrs. D's laughter the whole day long made the adults wish she would fly away. However, they could not open the door of her cage and release her because she did not live in a cage. She sat on a bangle stand on a window sill in our room. Whistling and laughing she looked through the glass while waiting for me to return so that she could claim her favourite perch, my shoulder. I guess I could have passed off for Long John Silver if only I had been a pirate with one leg, had a hook for an arm and wore an eye patch and if only Psitta screeched "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!" instead of cackling "Cheechu, padi da, padi da!"

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