Kaithapoo Dance

My Earliest Companion Swims Away

They just swarmed in and nibbled at what I spat -- a jamboree of wobbly creatures just under the algae-infested surface of the water.

They flowed on to the narrow, pebbled lanes with the gurgling waters of monsoon-laden ponds and swamps. Even as they wrestled among themselves to take a bite off my mucus, the damp air caressed my skin and the soft incessant drizzle tried to play mist in our part of the world – and failed yet persevered.

Till today, I didn’t know they were called ‘Miss Kerala’ – very apt though.

Not when they were the first to adorn my grand aquarium, which I so lovingly and meticulously arranged, maintained and spent hours on, in my school days. (I was particular that it did not have a single artificial element in it but only those which its residents would have found in their real world. Yes, I was in love with them.)

Not when I used to slip away from home in the lazy afternoons with eerpa and choonda (fibre twine and hook), digging for earthworms in our damp backyard and the thicket around my elderly abode.

Not when my like-minded elder cousin tricked me (Or did he? I don’t care really) into believing that they were called Thuppaloothi. I believed him because he was a botany student and I was well versed with their love for my spit.

Not when my friends informed me that it was (also) called Sooli.

Within weeks of the first showers of June 1 every year, they were everywhere around us, tiny little creatures, just hatched and seemingly bewildered.

Just like the moisture, like the kunnikuru – the billion red Gems-like seeds -- scattered across the top soil.

Like the refurbished foliage around us – the medicinal appa or communist paccha, the pungent chanakaparicchi, the ferocious-looking chena-ila, the gentle and leathery thaalu, the shy thottaavaadi, the sensuous thumba and the vile and itchy thuvva.

I still sometimes jump up in alarm when I think of the svelte, ochre species of fish. Because, it was once when I was trying to trap one of them in my palms in an overflowing oravu that my grandpa’s voice boomed over me -- a stick in his hand with ominous intentions. (I had left home three hours before to buy 250 gm of sugar for the evening tea. Sigh!)

Oh the Thuppaloothi had company too, they did.

The Kannanchaathan was the smartest of the lot – he would simply jump out of the water and land at some other spot, leaving his predators baffled. The different variety of Paral and the Blaappy were mostly found in the larger water bodies like paddy fields and temple ponds.

The Kadingali was my favourite – with its silvery scales and silver-angel feel, it looked splendid in the aquarium. The pack of catfish – Muzhu, Kadu and Etta – were the most slippery, with their slithering bodies and stings.

The mighty Brawl, with its school of goldfish-like tiny fishlets indicating the presence of the mother right underneath, was the bigger boys’ favourite catch.

The biggest of my catch, or at least their progeny, still have a peaceful existence in our well thankfully.

But the Thuppaloothi was undoubtedly the flagship of the monsoon’s marine offerings for kids like me, who simply adored the aquatic world even though I was pathologically scared of getting more than knee-deep into water.

Even as boys of my age dived from ever higher positions on the jackfruit tree, wildly embraced by different types of climbers, I liked to tell myself that it was the mystery of ‘what lies beneath the brimming surface’ that allured me and that I didn’t want to lift the wonderful veil off that. I lied, of course.

So I just kept to the overflowing waters, little drains and small tanks. Often I would be dipping my palms into the very chaalu which would have someone peeing into it not very far off from where I was. (I swear I didn’t see that. And I am not sure about direction of the flow.)

But that was my world. My own world. Of Kumblakottans, cuckoos, parangi maanga and hired bicycles.

The biggest pond in my locality now lies unused, dirty and virtually lifeless. Many of its fellow-visitors vanishing, the Thuppaloothi too is in its last lap apparently.

Today it has been tagged on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The freshwater species, also called Denison’s Barb, is among the biggest conservation challenges of the Western Ghats.

And they tell me that the mistimed monsoon still brings its version of the mist down the undulating landscape of my memories, but badly missing some of its most popular and once-ubiquitous progeny.

A monsoon sad and lonely.

The Thuppaloothi/Sooli
Born: In my boyhood.
Died: Before I die, I guess.

hi alll

:)