I mentioned last week Kavi’s advice about moving the two white gourami that remained from the lotus pond, and that was done the next day. Some months back I had built another tank on the balcony just outside my dining room, the balcony that had been expanded from the narrow one that led off the blue bathroom which had served my parents’ bedroom at the front of the house upstairs as well as the dark little bedroom next to it which was mine in my childhood.

When the house was partitioned, both those rooms went to my sister, but the bathroom remained with me. In the past the balcony off it had been cut off from the room along which it ran when mesh was put into the windows that overlooked it, as a security measure. But later the mesh nearest the bathroom was removed, for my mother when that room became the dining room built a sink on the balcony, to which plates were passed for washing through the window.

That window became a door when the house was partitioned, the middle double window was walled up, and the further window became a door into my new study. Both the balcony and the study were thrown out further over the porch over the entrance to my section of the house, which was through the old corridor that led from the back of the house.

The study had a rounded wall next to the balcony, which allowed me windows on three sides on the pattern of the old front lounge. And then last year I built a tank against the rounded portion of the wall nearest the dining room, so that I could have both fish and lotuses to gaze on while I ate.

But none of the little lotus plants I placed there survived, those I bought and those in little basins where Janaki had cultivated seeds from my other plants. There were little shoots of lotus plant at times, but for the most part there were just fish, little ones to prevent mosquitoes breeding. F

I had thought of the tank initially to house some of the angels which had developed in profusion in the upstairs big tank, but I did not want to put them there without the shelter of plants such as they had in their birthplace. But now I thought that the large gourami could survice without such shelter, though it did seem necessary to put a little net on top and weigh it down, since I fear we are beset by prowling polecats, and I have seen their mark on the balcony upstairs, with recently a lotus bud bitten across and the fish there apparently traumatized for they took ages to emerge to be fed.

So it was with due precaution that the two big white gourami, clearly orange now and much larger than when I bought them, were placed there. The first picture shows them as they appear when I sit in my place at the dining table, and it also gives a much clearer idea than my description above does of the layout of this enlarged balcony with study to the left and on the right the door to the room which was put up so the bathroom would not continue in isolated splendour.

The second picture is a close up which shows the two fish at two sides of the tank, while the little bit of gold in between them at the top of the tank is one of the little platies also there. I had had four, which survived for some months and you can see two of them in the third picture, along with a lotus stalk. But now I added several more from the temple flower pond. The fourth picture just shows two little fish, the first I put in there when the tank was built, in July. They alas did not survive. And then finally you see the two white gourami in their original home, the lotus pond downstairs, a couple of months back.