Back after over a fortnight away, I still find it difficult to get my head around what is going on now in this country. I still see no new ideas, no commitment to the radical reforms we need, no understanding of the need to roll back the excesses of the state whilst expanding the social services people need, increasingly now given the disasters of the last few years.
But I thought that, rather than commenting straight away on the current situation, I should sit back a while and let my mind, and my heart, digest what is happening. And I am the more stirred by this because of a fascinating experience I had just before I left, which made me realize how volatile feelings can be, and that one needs to think before one responds, and learn more about underlying facts.
I make no apologies then for talking this week about my fish, about whom – for they must be personalized – I have developed a deep commitment over the years in which I have nurtured them. These have not been many, but having seen what joy they gave my aunt, living on her own in Getamanna, albeit supported by devoted staff, I thought as I grew older I should cultivate them too.
This story starts with the fish I introduced just a few months back to the new lotus pond on the balcony, which I set up after a smaller one proved successful, with a number of white blossoms emerging over a few weeks. In that pond I had put a few small fish, orange and pink, but for the larger one I had not just four larger pink ones but also four angels. The latter were varied in colour, one predominantly black and the others mainly white, and one took easily to distinguishing them by their colour, a practice that humanity obviously engages in readily, with or without prejudice.
I would watch them for ages, with my morning coffee after feeding them and the smaller fish in the smaller lotus tank, and sometimes in the evenings when I had to resist the temptation to feed to watch them rise to the surface. But since the new tank has a glass front, food was not needed to see the angels glide and the smaller round pink fish dart about.
They all seemed very happy together and meanwhile the lotus plant I had placed there began to spread, the original four leaves soon becoming twenty so the surface of the tank was soon covered.
But then, a week or two after I got them, I noticed that one of the white angels kept darting at the pink fish. Occasionally she or perhaps he was helped by the black one. I was quite annoyed with them for this seemed, unseemly aggression in my peaceful world on the balcony, and wondered as I sat there what motivated this all too human resentment of others.
But then my worries for the comparatively small and helpless pink fish, as the white angel kept darting at them, with the black one sometimes entering too into the fray, vanished, only to be replaced by a very different sort of worry when Karu suddenly told me that the tank was full of baby fish.
Karu was the youngest of my commandos when I had security in the days when I headed the Peace Secretariat. He is now a Sergeant Major and given leave prior to retirement to work at what will be his future profession. He still has the same wry sense of humour, for he told me that having received rapid promotion on April 1st in successive years, he cannot quite take his elevation seriously.
He is in the Engineers so can build bridges and is now building for me a stairway to go above the tank to the slab above the stairs that lead to the balcony. I was lucky he was working on this at the beginning of October for his eyes are sharp. After he mentioned them, it took me quite some time to see the little ones. And meanwhile, having first wondered about them, he worked out that they were baby angels, an unusual phenomenon for such ornamental fish that rarely bred after they have been purchased. But I have been lucky, for my gourami too spawned soon after I got them, though they have not done this since.
And so then my irritation at the two aggressive angels vanished when I realized they were protecting their offspring. To understand is not only to forgive, but to cherish the more, and I realized then that I needed to support them by removing, as Karu suggested, the possibly predatory pink fish. He and his even more agile assistant Tharanga swiftly scooped them out, and I took them then downstairs, to the pond by the ehala tree which had had only very small fish when I moved the bigger ones after a couple died, perhaps because of traces from cement from the construction on the balcony before we covered it up.
And there thankfully those rotund pink fish seem to have flourished, no longer predators, but certainly the biggest fish in a shallow if not very little pond. Unfortunately, since I now see them only from above, their rotundity is no longer apparent, and they seem long and slim, like the other less colourful fish there.
But then there was worry for the babies up above. I panicked the next morning when I could not see them, wondering if the parents had relaxed and the other angels had turned aggressive. But when Karu turned up he found them and, after a day or two, I could see them on my own. But I also took a few out to keep in a glass bottle on my dining table so I could exult in them when I sat there too as well as on visits to the balcony.
The five little angels in my glass jar seemed to do well initially, with one dark one especially lively. But within a few days there were only four visible and Karu suggested I change the water. But I failed to ask him to do this and then Janaki and I worried about doing this ourselves given how small and vulnerable they seemed. So we decided to wait for Karu but he was a day late and when finally we emptied the jar there were only two little ones alive. There were two bodies including the bigger black one and I thought that had I let them be in the bigger tank, or moved them earlier, he and others would still be living.
The two survivors were out back in the tank, smaller than their brethren who were now readily seen morning and evening, adding to my guilt about having taken them away from the more natural habitat where they had been spawned.
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