My husband was no longer the man I had married. He had become grumpy and short-tempered, acting as if life had dealt him a bad hand.

He works in publishing, an industry that has its own share of problems. A self-made man, he worries that our sons have been handed too much. Our marriage was facing the familiar strains of midlife. All of this was getting him down.

Until he installed the bird feeder.

“But that’s so messy,” I said. In Mumbai, India, where we live, apartments are tiny. And while we have a little veranda with a few green plants, we do not have birds, and I did not see the point of putting up a bird feeder on our small open space to feed nonexistent creatures.

To try to feed birds in a city that’s rife with starvation and poverty also seemed too privileged and romantic a notion, something only rich people did in the Western world. Not here. Not in Mumbai. To read more from TISTA SEN, click here.