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Shinjini’s pet mice climb all over her. (below) Her Cocker Spaniel Candy |
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Shinjini Chaudhury’s dog Candy snores so loudly that sometimes she cannot tell if it’s her dog or her dad waking up the whole household. “But most of the time it’s Candy,” laughs the girl. “My mom can’t sleep because of it.”
The girl has three more pets but these guys don’t make a sound at all. “So quiet are they that I managed to hide them at home for two weeks without my dad finding out.” The reason Shinjini had to keep these pets in hiding is because they are white mice. “I saw them in the Galiff Street pet market and could not stop myself from bringing them home at Rs 25 each. I talked my mom into it but knew dad would blow his top.”
Her father argued that the mice would be as mischievous as the one in Tom and Jerry, but Shinjini insisted that these are white mice, making them Stuart Little, who was a thoroughbred gentleman in the eponymous film. They stayed and were christened Bheem, Nakul and Sahdev. But before you can assume the plumpest one to be the muscular second brother of the Pandavas, Shinjini points at the slimmest mouse and says: “This is Bheem.”
If the mice are snow white, Candy, the five-year-old Cocker Spaniel, is jet black. “So dark and flowy is her coat that my mom’s friend once mistook her for a black petticoat lying on the table and tried to keep her aside,” Shinjini laughs. “I do not think of Candy as a dog. She’s as intelligent as a person.”
All the pets are foodies. “Candy eats anything she can swallow and the mice relish khoi-muri as much as mangsho bhat,” says the Class XII girl. The mice are kept inside a cage but they enjoy their free run on table tops. They scamper about till the edges but never fall or jump off. Candy does not bother them either.
The Chaudhurys were in for a scare once when Bheem went missing from the cage. “We realised he had cut through the cage and escaped. We searched high and low and found him in the bathroom, relieving himself!”
Shinjini has always been an animal lover. Dog, cat, mouse, fish, rabbit, owl…she pets them all, often at the chagrin of her parents. Once when her father heard the mew of a kitten she had hidden at home, Shinjini got away by saying it was her phone’s new ringtone. And so popular is she among the mongrels in the neighbourhood that a few years ago one of them would escort her to and from her Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan school daily.
Brinda Sarkar
If you have a pet you have brought up at home as a family member and which has its eyes only for you, do write to us with your contact number at The Telegraph Salt Lake, 6, Prafulla Sarkar Street, Calcutta 700001 or call 2260-0115 after 3pm or email to saltlake@abpmail.com |
