"Let's do like something real wild,'? I say to my sister. 'Like smuggle a sholmaachh out of Baba's shopping bag and keep it in the overflow tank,'? sis suggests. So we do it. And find a name for the pet. Derozio.

It is the rainy season. We are rather proud of our seasons, really, they are different from those in the city: stronger in their flavours, more intense. It doesn't rain like Kolkatans' spittle on the sidewalk in the suburbs, when it rains here it pours. And makes the blue morning glory bloom around the electricity pole, so overhung with creepers that it once short-circuited on itself, and the waters rise in the courtyard.

My sister prefers the water to the winds. I am the opposite. Nor'easters are my favourite. Lately, though, the rains have been growing upon me. And the tank is full and Derozio is happy and we are home.

Time flies. The last term of college arrives and I promptly fall in love for the first time in my life with the most gorgeous boy in class. Well, he isn't exactly the most gorgeous, or even, exactly, gorgeous and there are many who know him who would be surprised at such a definition of him, but he is a smart, hard, living-on-the-edge type and certainly the type that attracts me. He has this pair of the most awesome, transparent eyes, eyes that you can brace against, that can tumble into yours and make you quite mad, that can stop your heart, or make it overflow and flip over sideways, depending (my friend says they are like lotus, I prefer to think they are like the autumnal shiuliphool), and a gorgeous, gorgeous smile that is the colour of my first memories of sunlight. He is small, slightly built, slightly younger and has a slightly infamous reputation that keeps other small-town girls and the studious ones away ' he doesn't care for girls and 'romance'? and the works, anyway. He is a brilliant mathematician (something I am pretty good at myself but not naturally gifted in), though he doesn't have to work hard at it at all and all that (just like me there again), a cricketer (a game that I had been in love with but never got around to actually playing) and does drugs. And makes me dream beautiful dreams. He makes me dream of big, golden lions with eyes that speak, that enter my house through the windows and park themselves about the furniture; he makes me dream of ruins of forgotten castles with rickety stairways in the middle of tall, green, endless grass that wave in black starlight, grasslands named after the town he hails from, where he lives with his autocratic father and semi-autocratic mother and is the king of the castle who rides about the house on an incongruously old, black, bicycle, which I get to borrow from his parents to go in search of him; he makes me dream of a magic, mythical bird with feathers the colour of a rainbow plus a kaleidoscope that sets the heavens afire, the colours beckon to me while I am in the garden, but I do not realise and go in to put the milk in the refrigerator and then I know and that very moment, I know, too, that the colours are receding and I run out and predictably, the sky is empty, and I still keep running out through the gates and on the street, barefoot, and then just as I realise that I can go no further, incompletely attired as I am, there they reappear over the field across the main road at the end of the street, between the trees where the sun sets in the evenings, for one final goodbye. Well, he makes me dream of all this and think and feel a great deal more, and after the most exquisitely restless month I have ever spent in all my life, I give in and am revealed to. Yes, love is real.

Well, once I know it all, I have to tell him all, of course, if not anybody else and if not for a relationship that I am too scared to hope for, for academic reasons. Because I owe him at least that in thanksgiving. Perhaps more.

Back home, Derozio has grown. He is now a year old, 10 inches long, never been weighed. Well, never been weighed since he had left the fish-seller's scales, of course, but then the reading had not been his individual weight. And he is more than a year old, really, as we got him early last monsoon, and it is already September this year. He is already too large for the tank. He is the only fish in the tank. Derozio, awkward and artless, grown and forlorn in the rains, swimming round and round his square, cement enclosure, surfacing when the lights fade, in the night or when the skies cloud over, lonely and lovesick like me. My sister is busy with her exams and I decide to find Derozio a mate.

There is a park in our township which has this really large lake. It has been heard that there are fish in that lake. Little subaltern boys of the neighbourhood are known to go fishing in the lake. So I catch hold of two of these boys and make a deal with them. They are to go get me three fish and I will pay them 20 bucks. The boys get the fish. They get three pairs of fish, not a figure that I had expected, but, perhaps, they overdo it in their enthusiasm. They are all smaller than Derozio and are members of one of the commoner, conical-headed species. I pay the boys and put the fish in my tank, nevertheless.

The next day is my birthday. The next day, Derozio will find himself a mate in the tank. And I will tell my classmate all about everything.

Next day dawns. Derozio is found floating in the tank, belly up, dead. He has been killed by one or more or all of his tankmates. There are six fish in our tank, no Derozio no more.

I grieve. Then I carry out my resolution. He turns me down. Some say he just wasn't ready for it when I told him, some say I came on 'too strong'?, others say it is my difficult reputation of a crazy, 'feminist'?, madwoman that did the trick. I do not care, only decide to pull myself together and rebuild the mess that is my life. He is still my goal, though, and would be for a long time to come. I do not notice it then but it is the end of the rainy season.

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