So here’s the deal. I need your advice. I recently received a mail from PETA about a career opening that seemed really interesting (no, I’m not talking of posing for those obscene campaigns of their’s). The pickle I’m in is that they asked me to fill out a questionnaire if interested. Apart from its length, no less than TWENTY SEVEN questions about my work experience, how I handle stress at work and other regular ones, they had a few questions that have put me in a spot.
“Are you a vegan or vegetarian?” Hmm.. coming from a Parsi home where breakfast is incomplete without “eedu” or eggs and with granny complaining that in the good ol days no vegetable was cooked without meat in the same dish.. Hell, at family get-togethers till today we serve chicken, meat, pork, beef and of course, in the sad little dish at the far end of the dining table “the veggie”, which is most often some left over potato that was heated in the micro for the one-off cousin who decided to “give it all up!”??
Ok, so say I fib about the vegan thing and just go ahead and be vege at office. Here’s the next one on their list “Have you ever had animals at home or cared for them in some other way? Please describe the situation and what became of the animals.” For those who know the answer to this , I SWEAR I did not make up the question and they really did ask ME this! For the puzzled, let me help you. As a child I loved playing with pups around out little bungalow in the quiet Salt Lake suburb of Calcutta. Dad would occasionally bring one into the house causing much excitement but we were never allowed a pet. My brother grew up a child equally excited with watching a calf being birthed outside our house in an open field as with carrying a live chicken with dad on our Vespa scooter to the slaughter-house before Sunday Dhansak. I can’t seem to remember how we landed up with them, but clearly remember our first pets to be 5-6 little colorful lovebirds in a cane cage shaped like a little house. Each day the entire cage would be taken out to the courtyard, washed and then hung on the washing line, with the birds inside of course. Little did we realise that cats lurk around Bengali neighbourhoods to catch the occasional fish bone, and lovebirds.
I don’t really remember feeling too bad about the birds. “Who can play with them anyway?” I guess. Quite a few years later we moved to Delhi while I was in junior school and daddy brought home a pup! Oh how excited we were! Not sure if it was a girl doggie or boy doggie we called it “Honey”. Honey stayed with us for about a week I guess, untill his name was changed to “Cleopatra” as the vet told us he was a girl (believe it or not, we were not sure till then!) Much sadness followed as we had to send Cleo back to her mother because of girl doggies creating problems with “heat”.
Our experiences do not end here. About 5 years later we get a pair of parrots. Most amused we name them “Limchu” and “Limchi”, just like the green candy bars we ate outside school. No, we did not eat our parrots. But within the first two weeks, Limchu pecked a hole in Limchi’s head while we were at school and then committed suicide in remorse by slitting his throat on the grill of the cage the next day! Much wailing, crying and guilty feeling followed with granny consoling me saying “these things happen sometimes baby”.
Ever since the Cleo episode, the “Can we pleeeease get a puppy?” line came up close to every Birthday, Christmas and other present-gettable day. We finally brought home Dougye (Yes, we spelt it like that even on his patient card at the vet in Delhi) after the popular TV show Dougie Howser M.D. about a genius kid doctor.Dougye came to us at the not-so tender age of 3 months, so he wasn’t too young and was quite a brat. Initially we had good times carrying him around and bathing and brushing him. But this didn’t last too long. Dougye soon began showing his ferocious streak, even refusing to come down from our terrace one day too scared to climb down the spiral staircase and almost biting us when we tried to carry him down! Soon we realised that Dougye was too much to handle and withing a month, he too went bk to his brothers and sisters where he came from. We visited him subsequently and realized it was probably a good decision as he turned out to be the biggest pariah there ever was!
After moving to Mumbai in my high school days, we tried to experiment with another species all-together and invested in a fish tank! I realise this post’s one of my longest ever so let me put it this way, after naming the first lot after liquors lie Whisky, Gin, Vodka and the next after currencies, Pound, Dollar and Rupaiyah, we soon lost count and ran out of names.I suppose the pet store guy that told us to open a couple of regular human antibiotic capsules and drop the powder into the water to cure the finrot was wrong afterall!
One of our most exotic pets( and I promise you, this is the last in the list) was Schumi turtle that bro bought for me as an rakhi present in advance about a month before the festival that celebrates sibling love. Schumi was a rock star. He sat on a rock all day till I would pick him up and put him in an old bread box filled with water to swim a bit. The coin-size guy was a lazy little bugger and I enjoyed harnessing him by trying to stuff bits of food into his mouth (even that small a creature must need more than a bite of cucumber all day!) We tried everything, from thinly sliced cucumber to lettuce leaves and even chicken heart as someone told bro, but Schumi just wasn’t much of an eater. One day Schumi was unusually lethargic. No, wait. He died. Most upset about our loss, bro agreed to carry little Schumi out of his tub and take him down to the garden for a burial when suddenly, the little guy awakened! Totally shocked by the slimy limbs emerging out of the dead shell, bro dropped little Schumi from the 6 Ft height of his hands, leading to what must have been a brain haemorrage. Schumi got through that day, but didn’t make it till Rakhi.
So that’s that. The next questions are “Why do you think you are qualified for this position?” and “ Why do you think you are the best person for the job?”
