The Bird and the Bough

It was a dark and rainy night. Near the grand mansion of a very rich man was a mango tree. The tree was not inside his mansion but it lay opposite the road. An ailing and aged bird just somehow managed itself between a bough of the tree.

However, as the night grew more darker and lonelier, and the storm more ferocious and hostile, the bough seemed to offer little protection to the ailing bird. Raindrops attacked her from all sides at a blistering pace. Still, she bore the pain and once more hid her shivering body in her all-the-more shivering wings.

She would not leave the bough's shelter. For in the small depression of it, she spent her childhood with her brothers. They may have died but their paining-sweet memories remained. She raised her children in the same depression when their wings were but small and fragile, and they could not fly. How could she forget those moments when in the evening she fed them looking at their twinkling eyes though she herself sometimes remained hungry? Alas - those dreams she nourished had flowered... Though they left her and now maybe lying in the wings of their sweethearts with no memory or thought of her but still she cherished those moments - she is a mother!

But nature, its code unlikely to be deciphered or understood, with one violent sweep of the storm broke that bough, and now that mother - she lay in a puddle beneath the tree. For a brief moment she fluttered her wings but her counted seconds now were few, and a thunder that roared and shook the seven firmaments closed her tragical book for ever!