The Art of Prioritizing(Zuhaib Ali) IT WAS Amar’s fifteenth birthday when his father gifted him a parrot that was fluffy and green with two hazy lines in his neck: black and red. Amar knew the hazy lines specify the stage of learning. “When there is a good teacher how can his student be dull”, he used to believe. It was unerringly so. He was clever but his student was far cleverer than him whom he called Metto. He was learning more quickly than he had thought.

Amar kept Metto’s cage in the backyard, dangling from a branch of a willow tree. The cage was yellow with a big center door and two small windows on either sides of the door. A shiny silver rod running through the cage and an enormous red ring dangling from the ceiling were Metto’s favorites in the entire cage. There were two pans behind the each window: one for almonds and peanuts and one for water. No one had ever seen them empty. They were always filled and so were Amar’s pockets with almonds and peanuts, and sometimes with pistachios.

METTO’S WORLD was fabulous but so confined: surrounded by eight-foot white walls, some willow, few apricot and plum trees alongside the walls. A lawn surrounded by multi-colour roses and a palm tree in the middle of lawn. Where they played and talked most of the time together which was Metto’s classroom likely. For Metto, it was everything: a comfortable life but unaware of the outer world.

When Amar comes back from the school, he visits Metto as soon as he could. It was likely so in the morning. Few pace away from the cage, he used to start calling “Metto, Metto”. Amar always heard the same word like an echo. He escorted the cage to the middle of lawn and slid the door up for Metto to set him free nearby the palm tree. Metto could set himself free because he knew how to slide up the door but he had never tried to do so. It was either love with Amar or, might be, he had never tasted the taste of true freedom.

Amar always talked with Metto in Pashto. He had crammed some of them. Whenever Amar fished out almonds and peanuts from his pocket, Metto talked frequently “Toti choori khore”—parrot! Wanna eat choori. He used to play with the intonation of these words, sometimes it sounded like question and sometimes order. He had learned one more sentence after meeting with his friend belonging to jungle. He always said that at the end of meal “Da wakht bam teer she”—this shall to be passed, which Amar had never taught him.

Amar saw his friend coming daily and sat in the willow tree nearby the Metto’s cage. He let them and did nothing. “He has already one teacher who has taught him everything. The new one can never succeed in enticing him. After all, I feed him well. No one can feed him better than me. He will never leave me”, Amar mumbled. But he didn’t know that the new teacher had taught him something which the old one hadn’t. It was the knowledge of freedom and outer world with untouchable horizon.

ONE EVENING, Amar was on the way to feed him. What he saw was extremely shocking for him. He saw the Metto sliding the door up to accompany the parrot of jungle. Amar’s heart sank with seeing something close to his heart was leaving. He ran toward them to catch Metto which was slow in flying as if he had forgotten flying after being in cage for long time. He managed to take wing and flew away. Amar chased them both for long distance. They finally vanished in the woods.

THE GLOOMY and thwarted Amar was coming back home after long running. His heart was still pounding. Suddenly, he reminded Metto’s words this shall to be passed which eased his grief little. After few paces, he thought that Metto had taught him the Art of Prioritizing Things. “At last, he prioritized beloved over me. At least, he prioritized freedom over comfort”, he mumbled. He thought of his own life too, in order to prioritize things. In the midway, he decided he would tell his parents, “I don’t want to be a doctor as you want me to be. I would like to be a writer”. All the half way, he was trying to gain the courage to say this to his parents who did not consider creative writing a job at all.


Written by Mr Zuhaib Ali
Zuhaib7khan@gmail.com

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