| by comrade commissar | Thomas | @ Friday, December 31, 2004, 1:54:00 AM | permalink |
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Was looking at the small plastic fish tank in my living room today. The container with guppies inside was my mom's idea. Looking at the little bits of life moving about set me walking down memory lane.
I am 10 years old. We have a fish tank in our house. This tank is a big rectangular glass one, with variety of fishes frolicking about. Sometimes I would spend minutes staring blankly at them, swimming around in their aquatic world. One day, when I came home from school, I saw that something was wrong. The usual drone of the motor that pumped air into the fish tank & kept it oxygenated was absent. The dead silence in the living room was unnerving, considering that I had already got used to the background noise of the motor. When I got closer to the tank, I was in for a rude shock. There was something abhorring about what I saw. The fish were lumped near the water surface. Some were floating upside down. Some were bloated. They were dead. What was more obscene was the state the living were in, in that same tank. Some stayed in the depths, oblivious to their plight. Maybe its because they were all too aware, & so in an attempt to maintain semblances of normalcy, they remained in their positions of denial. Others fought for their very lives. The few that were alive near the water surface feebly struggled upwards & mouth-first every now & then, gasping for oxygen in a manner unlike their usual method of absorption through their gills. They jostled with the encroaching dead, already in various degrees of decay. What I saw before me deeply disturbed me. The manner in which the living & dead were mingled about struck me as being extremely undignifying. Up to that point in my life I have never seen death like this in the face before. I was angered, I wanted to fix the situation. I wanted to divide the living & the dead. I looked around for the fish net which my father usually used. Unable to find it, I went to wash my hands, returned to the tank, & with initial hesitation, reached in & took out the dead fish with my bare hands. By & by, all the dead fish were removed & disposed of in the toilet bowl. After every last of these were dumped in the bowl, I grimly looked at them for a brief moment. And then I pulled the flush, quickly accompanied by the gushing sound of water. It seemed strange, but the sound which I heard this one time was different. It was akin to that of mighty waves, a loud beast-like roar, that forcefully purged away what was unclean. A thankless job, but somebody had to do it. |
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