Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Aquaria


Back in college days I had three aquaria – one for the guppies – the whole bunch of them with brilliant iridescent colours flashing mercurial all day. 



Another was for the fighters – they came in deep rich hues of magenta-mauve, blue- navy and sapphire with fan-like majestic tail fins trailing behind them.  Nasty tempers they had! Often their fights would make ugly shreds out of their tail fins. Then there would be nothing majestic about them and they would so look like rag pickers! Funny breed!



The third one was for the gold fish. I had a solitary huge specimen that went round and round – eyeballing me emotionlessly. I sincerely hoped it was enjoying its space and life! There was – sadly -no way you could decipher that. 



Keeping those tanks clean took the better part of a day involving various buckets and big fish nets – which were actually soup strainers improvised for the job! I loved keeping my glass tanks clean and my fish healthy.

Buying the grainy fish food packets and fresh worms for them, running the bubble machine; buying exotic plants was the fun on weekends. So was selecting and adding carefully measured liquid pigment drops to the water in my aquaria so that when the lights came on in the dusk it all looked so dreamy! I was very happy then and miss that time of my life so much! 
 
Then life moved on and aquaria and sundry other things that made up my young life were a thing of the past.

Till my Dad went and bought a pair of gold fish for my toddlers. With excitement mounting, we worked on giving them a pretty and safe home –with all my memories flooding back.

We bought a beautiful gigantic glass bowl for them – just like in Tom & Jerry! I didn’t have such fancy stuff back in my time. All I had was rectangular glass panes sealed together by black strips of tar. But I was so happy with that! 



Needless to say that my kids were ecstatic! We named the gold fish Hunky and Dory. There was no way of knowing which was which since they were like two peas in a pod. I’d have named them ‘Twiddle Dum Dum’ and ‘Twiddle Dee Dee’ but that wasn’t very easy for the kids to say; so Hunky & Dory it was.

That again is now in past. At present, my kids are busy with their lives but I have a companion – their legacy before they got so busy with their lives. 

It is a lost and rescued love-bird from Madagascar. It is silly and it has an attitude! It also is extremely melodramatic!

Being a full-fledged animal rescue kind of a family we always have some creature or the other – all varieties - two legged, four legged, feathered, finned and furry ones – under our roof. But more about the melodramatic love bird and our other animal rescues in the next post.

Great day, all!

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Life!


Life is - most of the times - routine, mundane and monotonous. But then some quirk of fate or whatever comes your way and you are so flung out somewhere that you have no clue where you are and how to go on with your life.
A while ago a news item from the morning paper threw me so bad that I am still recovering from it. I have walked around with a knife stuck in my heart since then and am waiting for the great healer – time - to heal me while I pray for the mother involved in that heinous incidence.
The fact that her – whoever she is - son who died was 23 years old and my son completed 23 yrs recently are certainly connected – painfully.
Her 23 yr old was returning home on a two wheeler after wishing a friend for the birthday at midnight. He was hit by a car. The car was occupied by some drunken men; the driver too was inebriated.
The young man was injured badly and so they decided to dump him in front of a hospital and leave unobtrusively so that he gets the medical aid and they plain get away with it.
Well, fate played a cruel hand and they saw police near the hospital and so they took him to another place and left him there while all the time he kept pleading with them to let him talk to his mother!
The young man died during the night on that quiet deserted road.
The fact that a good citizen had witnessed the hit and had left not wanting to be involved in “police matter”; certain that the man was being taken to a hospital and so felt that there was nothing more that needed to be done.
The next day he found out that the victim had died and that too on another road and he put two and two together and gave police all his help to nab the offenders.
I have no clue how the mother is going to spend the rest of her life and the knife in my heart stays for a long time, I know.