My first encounter with what we then called “Australian parrots” came two decades ago in Karachi’s Victorian-era Empress Market, a sprawling landmark where the smell of turmeric and cardamom drifted through arched hallways. Amid that sensory storm, one corner was always a riot of colour and sound: traders hawking cages crammed with budgerigars.
“Budgies”, as I would later learn to call them, were auctioned off in the sticky heat of Friday mornings. It was the time when Pakistan was still observing Friday as the weekly day off. The bird’s popularity was unmatched: hardy, inexpensive and adorned in flashes of yellow, green and blue, they were the undisputed crowd favourites.
For me, a teenage refugee from Afghanistan wandering through the market, they stood out as more than mere merchandise. Their sound was striking, bright, insistent, almost defiant against the din of bargaining voices and clanging metal cages. Something in their restless chatter and bursts of flight fascinated me.
In Pakistan, keeping budgies was more than a pastime. It was a quiet, bold act of creating life and beauty in cramped homes, a way of softening the edges of hardship. Families who had little else would hang a cage by the window or under a tree somewhere. Children were taught to feed and care for them and, in doing so, they learned tenderness, patience and responsibility. I remember a neighbour’s son, no older than 10, proudly naming his pair after Bollywood stars – Shah Rukh and Kajol.
Time swept me far away. Years later, in Germany, I saw no budgies at all. It wasn’t until I returned to Afghanistan that the familiar sight reappeared. In Kabul’s old bazaar, there they were again: lively, quarrelling, impossible to ignore. The cages were different this time – not the tiny metallic contraptions of Karachi but larger enclosures woven from sticks, sometimes decorated with beads or scraps of fabric, as if the cage itself needed to be as pretty as the birds it held.
But grown-up me noticed something else. These were no longer just “cute” birds. In Afghanistan, the tradition of weaving folklore around animals is rich – nightingales as symbols of eternal love, falcons of courage, crows of mischief. The budgerigar was not a central figure of legend but somehow it carried echoes of those grand tales. Kabul friends would share stories where budgies slipped into the narrative as comic relief, small but persistent characters.
One story has stayed with me: a petty thief broke into a food shop one night, not for money but to “liberate” his favourite budgies. He ended up locked inside. By morning, the shopkeeper found him having eaten all the biscuits and smoked all the cigarettes, shouting in mock indignation about being “kept waiting” for the shop to open. The story was told with laughter – not to mock the thief so much as to marvel at the grip those little birds had, even on people living at the edges of society.
And then, time spun me yet again, carrying me to Melbourne. Here, for the first time, I encountered budgerigars and many other Australian birds as they were meant to be: wild, social, free. On my daily walks through the leafy suburbs of Casey, I often pause to watch some of them dart overhead – small colourful comets against a vast sky. Their calls weave through the eucalyptus-scented air, stitching together a soundscape utterly unlike the claustrophobic markets of Karachi or Kabul. No cages, no bargaining hands reaching through bars – just wide, sun-drenched skies with room to play, to squabble, to belong.
This contrast between the captive budgies of my childhood and the wild flocks of my new home has become more than an observation. It is a lens through which I understand migration, freedom and belonging. It seems, just like me, the birds had different lives in different geographies: bartered and caged in one, woven into street lore in another and, finally, here, unshackled, their wings stretching fully into the air they were born for.
The budgies are for me fragments of memory – of Karachi’s crowded markets, Kabul’s storytelling alleys and Australia’s open skies.
• Shadi Khan Saif is an editor, producer and journalist who has worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Germany and Australia
