Aditriya Dolui doesn’t play with dolls. “Why should I when I have so many babies to play with?” she smiles. The nine-year-old proudly calls herself the mummy of two rabbits, a kitten, and a bird.
Jack, a black-and-white rabbit, was brought home by her father about a year ago. “But he would get lonely when I went to school, so we got Rose, a white rabbit,” says Aditriya. “I had thought they would have bunnies, but it later turned out that Rose is also male! Nonetheless, he’s stuck with a female’s name now.”
Her uncle gifted them a bird, whom she named Aryan, and then came Chomchom, a kitten who joined the family barely a month ago. “Chomchom is a rescued cat. He was probably attacked by other animals and had hidden inside the engine of my art teacher, Saswati Ganguly’s car, opposite where we live. They’re great animal lovers too, but her daughter, Dharitri didi, has asthma, so they had to give him away,” says the student of the CJ Block school named after Begum Rokeya.
Aditriya’s mother, Pinky, recalls how excited the girl was when she agreed to adopt the kitten. “She couldn’t go a minute without asking when we would go and get him,” she smiles.
Chomchom was tiny and badly injured, but now that he’s gaining strength, he’s showing his true colours. The rabbits are good boys but the kitten suddenly runs over and smacks them. He jumps on them to wrestle, and the poor things get decent exercise just running away from him.
Aditriya spoon-feeds the rabbits, takes them to the park, sings them to sleep, and spends all her free time petting them. But the kitten sits on her books whenever she tries to study. “And if I take out my mother’s phone to watch cartoons, it is he who taps the YouTube icon for me,” she laughs. He likes watching cat videos and even knows how to scroll until he finds one he likes. He also climbs up trees sometimes and gets stuck, waiting for my mother to go pull him out.”
Aditriya loves all animals, but ask her what pet she would like next, and she doesn’t hesitate. “Rooster,” says the girl who used to have one when she was younger. “We had once found two lost chicks near CK Market and kept them. One of them lived with us for some months. He would wake us up by cock-a-doodling early in the morning and loved eating chicken with me,” she says with a laugh, well aware of the irony.
