I got back home yesterday after two weeks away, having worried  more now when I travel than I used to do when I was younger. This has a lot to do with increasing age, but it is also because I miss more and more what I have left behind. How this happened I have started to explore in the Tuesday post on my Facebook page, about my animals and other family, so I will content myself here with recounting the sheer joy of coming back to what is familiar, and noting the changes, revelling in continuity and enhancement.

But there can also be sadness. While I was away Janaki told me that the remaining white or rather pink gourami in the pond under the ehala tree had died, and though I told her to bury it she had kept it for me, in the freezer. I was happy to see him once again, looking as lovely as ever, and we buried him this morning in one of the new little beds I had had constructed in the garden, this one under the window of the downstairs big bedroom which I had occupied for a quarter of a century.

The first picture shows him on the bench outside the garage, to which she brought him while I was sitting there with Rocky and his yoghurt, and the second shows him under the plant where he now lies.

Janaki had no idea how he died, for there were no injuries on him, and as I have shown previously that pond was covered with netting ever since his companion vanished, as did two red carp. But Kavi told me later that he thought it was perhaps time to move the other two white gourami from the old lotus pond, for they were growing bigger, and perhaps there was not enough water and not enough space, and their fins were getting damaged.

Kavi is convinced that these white gourami, as they were called when I bought them, are the same as the massive pink gourami he has nurtured for years, and whom he had got nursed back to health when he seemed to suffer after the pink tub he has been in for years was affected by the building. His fish doctor told him that he needed company if he was not to continue aggressive, and Kavi’s uncle gave me a pair of delightful large grey fish with whom the pink gourami seems to have co-existed happily, in the tub now transposed to the tortoise enclosure.

I have showed the fish there in the past, but recently the water had been muddied, and though the pink gourami was always visible given both size and colour, it took me time to see the other two when I fed them in the morning. But while I was away Kavi had cleaned the tub, and they all three looked splendid there today, as can be seen in the third and fourth pictures.

And he had also cleaned the upright tank I spoke about last week, so that the fish there are easier to see, as is the head of a statue I had placed there and which Kavi put centre stage. In the first picture you see the white catfish on the side, with four of his companions, and in the last picture just three fish but also two of the little animals that entertain them and me.