Et Tu Auratus

The television is on. The characters are recognizable, I see them often while having dinner. My mother has dozed off; the story doesn’t matter, it never did. It is like a pill, lulling her to sleep with its rather loud and dramatic music. She would watch the re-run of the same serial next morning. I question the futility of this entire exercise, but as soon I converge to form a judgment I look at my own life choices and give it a pass. Idiosyncrasies and peculiarities are what gives an individual it’s individuality. And you need to harness a lot of courage and empathy to observe individuality with equanimity. Both of them I seemingly lack but I sincerely try to acquire. I read somewhere that it takes time; I believe it was a reliable source.

There is an aquarium just below the TV. Metaphorically it is a TV, telling a story of its own, only the movie is silent and you can only try to switch the channels here. Just like my mother’s serial I feebly recognize the characters, the sets and props, and the same old story. The aquarium has pebbles and rocks at the bottom to imitate the marine environment but it is failing at it very grandly. The gaudy neon light which makes it look like a disco from the 80s, the fake trees which look more dead and rotten than real rotten trees. If fishes could speak, even they would want out of this fest of mockery, this prison which looks like a shady pub where fishes solicit everything illegal. This little circus of lights, food dropping in everyday at the same time; it’s a prison albeit a brightly and badly decorated one.

One morning my eyes sheepishly open from the 6 o’ clock alarm. I thought this would be an uneventful day just like the past week or the past month and what I saw next, didn’t change it much either. As I walked up to the main hall, bolting at the doors and hidden corners to get some water, I heard a splash. Following my basic instincts, my eyes went to the aquarium. A fish leaped out of the water, my sleepy brain took a few seconds to register what happened. What was it doing? Checking out his mammalian gills? But unlike the perfect pole vault, it didn’t land on its head and swim up to hear the accolades of the crowd. This is not SeaWorld Florida, rather it is Aquarium Noida. It landed rather awkwardly and started sinking slowly to the bottom of the tank; its acceleration decreasing with depth. It’s existence vanishing with the passing second like a tablet dropped in water.I took a bottle of water from the table and grabbed a front row seat for the show. The room was dark, a faint morning light from the window gave a little definition to the room, the main attraction still adorned with gaudy lights. I looked for the geometrical centre of the aquarium and positioned myself so as to get unperturbed and unbiased view of the show. Only a background score by Mozart was missing to make me feel like a complete psychopath. A few other fishes which were earlier nonchalantly cruising at the bottom of the tank, started moving with increasing speed. You can guess from the way they move that they were on a mission, there was something sinister in their movement, this was no jog in the park. One of them came near the dead fish and gave it a nudge. For a second I thought it was an allegorical moment of empathy, a friend grieving or reviving a lost friend. But the moment of compassion was rather a moment of calculation. The nudge to the dead fish was only a setup for the next move by this other fish. It came charging towards the dead fish and catapulted it out of the water. The fish then fell straight on its belly, resembling the sound of a tight slap. Out of sheer luck or planning, the dead fish fell near the air filter; the bubbles coming out of the filter hit it like bullets out of a machine gun. One after the other, the small air pellets hit it so hard that it crashed on to the other glass wall of the aquarium. Confused and startled I didn’t how to react to this amazingly engineered post-mortem torture carried out by these puny little fishes. As the dead fish went to the bottom of the tank, a few other went near it, sniffed it a little and then swam away from it again. I realized, from now on there will probably a re-run of the last episode. I left with a question, was this a some sinister ploy or aquatic life testing the limits of their cognitive skills?

I went back to my daily routine of prepping for the day ahead. The usual of bath, breakfast and run. As I ran towards the closing doors of the metro and made it in time, I thought I had averted the usual hiccup for being late. As my heart slowed down after the run, the lights started getting brighter. The little fluorescent light burned my eyes, after a few seconds I could only see a white screen, soon I lost the strength in my legs and came crashing down. There was a hush in the compartment; some people gathered near me, their faces streaked with white and their voices seemed all muffled. They sniffed around a bit, and once again when the doors beeped that the next station has arrived. They dispersed quickly as they had gathered.