It's been so long since one saw a sparrow in the city.
Any city.

A quick check through memory, and then a slightly more focused one, yields no definite result. Hmmm...it must be years, then.

And parrots. There used to be hordes of parrots crowding the banyan and gulmohur trees near home, and memories somehow seem to associate them as being especially noisy and abundant in the early evening; while one sat at the window, munching on cheese toasts after coming home from school, watching them fly around.

When did they disappear? When did their little chirps and loud squawks stop intruding on the noises of daily life? One suspects the distraction was caused by those beautiful documentaries on the nature channels, with their breath-taking visuals and intricate details. What chance did the poor birds have in real life, smeared with the grime of the city as they were?

And what else have we forgotten, and how differently did we do things, when we did them differently then?

This is how it changes, little by little, till one day we stop, and wonder when we agreed to live in these strange worlds.

But the answers just giggle and scamper away, leaving behind a sense of .... of....

....
oh, well.