Who says Mumbai has no wildlife? In addition to the rats we’ve seen running along the sidewalks (for which there are official city jobs dedicated to killing them) and the raven/crows that eat everything the rats miss, Bombay is home to tons of different kinds of animals. Our experiences this weekend centered around 3 specific types.
On Saturday morning, I had volleyball practice and a school meeting, so Susan was at home with the kids and decided to go swimming. There really is no way to describe the fish experience any better than in Susan’s own (edited) words:
At 1:30 today, the kids and I went to the Kiara pool after notifying the guards in the morning that we would be using it. The pool was in miserable shape: debris floating on the top, leaves littering the bottom, and refuse I don’t care to identify swirling in the depths. The kids immediately jumped in and began to clear the pool. Leaves and sticks and bugs accumulated in a pile as they pulled things up from below. A scream shattered our industry as Breck dragged up a dead, decayed fish. He flung it to the side and scrambled out of the pool. I hauled Alea out and went over to the guard ( who had been enjoying watching our labor for the past ten minutes) and wanted to know how a dead fish could have landed in the pool. He raised his hand to the sky and said, “It’s the trees.”
Not a great way to greet the weekend.
Sunday morning dawned as perhaps a better day, but then two mating falcons began screeching at each other in the tree branch right outside our window. Normally I like watching and listening to these large birds of prey, but not at 5:30 on a Sunday morning!
And finally, that afternoon, we were ‘invited’ to adopt some neighborhood puppies. We have a tiny apartment, and I don’t want a dog ripping our stuff apart, and Susan is very responsible about wanting to care for an animal, so the NO answer was easy to give. But Breck still had a ball rolling around with three of the 5 that are available, even though he got a little nip from them.
So there are our animal stories from this weekend - which was definitely a “2 rather than 3″ sort of weekend for us. Only 35 more days of school until summer!
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