I and my sister always desired to own a pet, though I wonder if there would be one adoptable animal my family wouldn't have apprehensions about.
I and my sister are wary of dogs, my mother jumps up the chair at the sight of cats, my father will not hear of any rodents (even if they are cute little squirrels), plus bless me! I am so full of all emotional weaknesses towards all creatures born to fly and roam free. How can we cage the birds and rabbits and parrots, when they world is the wilderness?
Then one sunny morning our pet found its own way home. My mother had just opened the valve to let the water supplied by municipal corporation into our underground tank, when with the water out popped a wee little fishy.
My sister had been beside my mother then and was the first to notice. She immediately brought our attention and fetched a pail to draw it out. We still wonder how that tiny thing happened to survive all the process of filteration, bleaching and machinery to reach us. But it was a wee little baby. Just a day or so old maybe.
We sisters were so excited, we had found our pet. We immediately adopted it, transferred it to a glass tumbler, and placed it on the window sill. We called it Stuart Little as it was so little and as white as its anime namesake.
We made tiny balls of wheat and borrowed cooked grains of rice from the kitchen to feed it, and talked long hours to it, because we had heard fishes and plants grow well if we interact with them.
As weeks passed by we saw it grow bigger in centimeters, and got a couple of gold fish to give it company, so it may not feel lonely. Soon, we bought a glass aquarium, lined it with pebbles, artificial weeds and plants, and completed it a mermaid-in-a-oystershell aerator.
We got few more fishes of all kinds to make a big happy fish family. We learnt to even clean the aquarium. Whenever we found any two fishes fighting, we would take one of them away and place dunce in a jar next to the aquarium for few hours.
One of my school friend even lent me a book on caring for fishes, but it was an elaborate book and we could only muster patience to flip through it.
But it was through this book that we learnt not all fishes socialise and some species are even blood enemies. Alas! It was too late. The war had already gotten bloody.
Before we could decide whom to keep together and whom apart and how, many bigger fishes had lunched on smaller ones, and our Stuart Little too was gone.
But the needful was anyway done, but the magic was lost. The others died their timely death, and we never felt like bringing home another fish or pet home.
