A young boy named Devu had a small green parrot that his uncle had given him on his birthday. The parrot lived in a brass cage in the corner of the verandah. Devu fed it green chillies and pieces of guava and learned to say "Jai Jinendra" along with it. One morning Devu woke up to find the door of the cage hanging open. A monkey from the peepal tree must have hit the latch in the night. The parrot was not gone, though — it was sitting on the open door, looking at the sky, then back at Devu, then at the sky again. It did not know what to do. Devu's grandmother, who was sweeping the verandah, sat down beside him. "Child," she said, "every living being wants what you want — to be free. To eat the fruit it likes, in the tree it likes, with the wind in its feathers. The kindest thing we can do for a creature is to let it live the way its body was made to live." Devu sat very still for a long time. Then he held out his finger. The parrot stepped onto it. He walked to the edge of the verandah and lifted his hand to the sky. The parrot took two slow steps, beat its wings once, and was gone into the bright morning. Devu cried a little. But that night, when the family said the Navkar Mantra together, he felt for the first time that he understood what "ahimsa" actually meant.