Morning Shows…The Fish!
My
cousin, a year older to me, sounded the wake-up call. An errand normally my
grandfather used to undertake almost every working morning with painful
consistency, that is say, his wake-up calls used to get louder and louder till
the target had to succumb to it, with a sullen face or not he never cared
about. That morning my grandfather left home very early on business to the nearby
town, and therefore, my cousin took up the charge.
I
had to say goodbye to my rain-sleep as my cousin called up for the third time. I
got up and went through the morning rituals with total indifference: sipping
the red tea in a mug with a hard piece of gud (jaggery) offered by my
grandmother; going to the country toilet about half a mile away, that rainy morning
under an umbrella; taking a bath in the bamboo structure near the pond from
where buckets of water had to be brought in; dressing up in the school uniform;
sitting on the flat wooden stool at the clay-floored dining area with my
grandmother serving steaming hot rice and pulse curry; and more saddened that
morning by the thought of trudging more than a mile on the rough pebbled road
to school bare footed as the school authorities wanted all their students come
like that, yours not to reason why.
Heavy
school bags strung around our shoulders and sheltered under the umbrellas we
walked out and headed for the gate made with pieces of whole bamboos at the end
of the front grassy garden that could be also be called a green lawn sans the
meticulous maintenance. And then, we froze.
The
sight that we encountered was something that never even came in our wildest of
dreams. Through the lush green grassy overgrowth was coming or rather swimming
towards us a large-sized fish! It was a striped snakehead or a fish of the
Channa Striata category, a variety of which is found in the north eastern parts
of India, called Sol in Assam. The fish was coming at high speed
overcoming the lack of its watery comforts, and perhaps looking for a pond or a
river to jump back in.
We
looked at each other uttering cries of extreme surprise and joy. Nothing more
was needed for the required action. We deposited our school bags at the veranda,
threw away the still-open umbrellas around and began the lovely chase.
The
chase was not easy at all. The fish was big and energetic, moving around real
fast and the falling rains made it very slippery. My cousin positioned himself
in front of the fish and I at the rear, and tried to trap it. The fish slipped
out of our grips several times moving and jumping hither and thither. We didn’t
get angry or bored, because the unique adventure kept us riveted.
Finally,
my cousin managed to put his stranglehold over the fish’s head, lifted it and
ran across the house to the inner courtyard with loud cries of victory. I joined
in too. Soon, all members of the house assembled, surprised and happy at our prized
catch. Only my grandmother looked grave. She had a good reason.
Our
neighbor across the front bamboo gate had never been in the good books of my
grandfather, the former being always quarrelsome and nasty, at times
threatening my grandfather physically. And in all probability, that fish jumped
out of his pond that was just on the right side of our front garden. It meant
that my grandfather would most probably ask us to throw it back in the pond or
hand it over to the neighbor. My grandmother seemed to be silently lamenting
the fact that she would never be able to serve us with the tastiest of curries
of that catch.
My
cousin kept the fish in an iron container, half-filled with water and sealed it
up with a strong lid, putting a few bricks over it for extra safety. Our school-going
that day discarded justifiably, we spent the whole day taking turns to observe
our prized prisoner even as the suspense kept mounting as to its ultimate
destiny.
Grandfather
arrived in the evening. We crowded around him, not daring to inform him of the
catch. Finally, over a cup of tea, grandmother told him. To our huge relief he
smiled sweetly.
“No
issues! We can very well have a feast tonight! You see, this is the peak of the
summer rains. At this time rivers, ponds or even street drains overflow, and
all kinds of fishes move around, changing their habitats, surfacing or jumping
in anywhere. So, you can’t say that this particular fish belongs to our neighbor;
maybe it has infiltrated his pond from the river or the drains or from someone
else’s ponds!”
Our
joy was thus brought into an ecstatic climax.
(To
be continued with one more story)
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