World Environment Day | As a solo traveller and therapist, I’ve learned that the most unexpected places often hold the deepest stories. And sometimes, healing appears in the form of feathers.
The first time I saw them, I wasn’t sure if I was looking at parrots or leaves that had suddenly taken flight.
It was humid evening in Chennai, and the terrace I stood on had started to blur at the edges, as thousands of parrots glided in with astonishing grace. There was no noise. No chaos. Just the soft rustle of wings and the rhythm of peanuts cascading into feeding blocks. The scene felt less like a gathering and more like a meditation in motion.
This wasn’t a sanctuary or a sanctuary disguised as a spectacle. It was the everyday rooftop of a man named Sundar, whom we’ve come to call as "The Parrot Man."
Every morning, Sundar and his wife Vidya host this quiet ceremony. They don’t call it a practice or a mission. There are no slogans, no causes. Just the ritual of feeding, watching, and holding space for the green-winged guests, that arrive like clockwork, so camouflaged in the trees that for a moment, you’d believe the branches themselves had taken flight.
Their terrace is a living, flapping, feathered canvas. So many birds at once, it’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the green begins.
But beneath the wonder lies a story etched in quiet grief. Years ago, Sundar lost his father. The kind of loss that rearranges your internal landscape without warning. And in the thick of that mourning, when the world had dulled its colours and routine felt impossible, it was these parrots who returned, day after day. Patient, loud, insistent on being fed.
In the stillness of dawn, they gave him structure. In their presence, he found an unexpected balm. What began as a small act of care turned into a rhythm that soothed something deeper.
“Every morning, I started showing up for them,” he said, “and in a way, they showed up for me, too.”
As he spoke, I found myself slipping into listening the way I often do in sessions—not just to words, but to the pauses, the unsaid, and the softness around grief when it has been lived with long enough to be spoken of gently.
Sundar speaks about the birds the way one might speak about old friends: affectionate, amused, and occasionally surprised. He shared, laughing, how couples now bring their partners here on Valentine’s Day. “I wouldn’t have even known it was Valentine’s,” he grinned, “if Vidya hadn’t told me.”
That’s the thing about Sundar and Vidya. Their warmth is not performative. Their home isn’t curated for Instagram. It’s real, lived-in, filled with sleepy dogs, munching goats, and cats stretched out like royalty. It breathes.
Vidya tells me about a retired military officer from another country who once visited in search of peace. He’d been to temples, ashrams, the works. But it was on this terrace—surrounded by birds and peanuts, and the quiet kind of welcome that expects nothing from you—where something finally clicked. “He said this was the only place that calmed his mind,” she recalled. And I believed her instantly.
As someone who works with people navigating inner storms, I often wonder: what does peace really look like? Is it always something we “find,” or could it be something we quietly build seed by seed, ritual by ritual?
Sundar and Vidya don’t believe in fanfare. Their advocacy is the kind that slips into your conscience without raising its voice
“Put a pot of water on your window sill,” they say.
“Leave a handful of rice on your terrace.”
No hashtags. No campaigns. No entry tickets. Just soft reminders that kindness can be quiet and still vast.
In a world obsessed with urgency and spectacle, this rooftop offers something radical: stillness. Gentleness. A place where grief doesn’t have to hide, and where healing can look like peeling open a sack of peanuts at sunrise.
This isn’t a tourist destination. It’s not on any list. But maybe that’s why it matters. It’s a place where trees watch in awe as their feathered cousins take flight. Where you don’t have to say much to belong. Where routine becomes ritual. And where, if you listen closely, even sorrow sounds like birdsong.
And maybe that’s what I carried away with me—not just the image of parrots against a charming Chennai sky, but a quiet knowing that healing often chooses the slowest routes. That grief can find its rhythm in shared silence, and that not all therapy looks like a room with a couch. Sometimes, it’s a rooftop, a handful of rice, a man who found purpose in peanuts, and the stillness that comes from being truly seen by another soul, or a sky full of green wings.
As a therapist and traveller, I’m always looking for places that soften the world’s edges. This one reminded me that the heart remembers where it was gently held.
