Ingenuity at work

After a too-short nap to while away the hot afternoon, I woke up to the results of A’s latest project. A jam bottle, complete with silvery sand, coral, sea weed and a few tiny black and white, striped fish that seems to thrive so well in the Lakshadweep islands. The mouth of the bottle was tied with an ordinary polythene bag with holes punctured in it. A miniature aquarium and a perfectly proportioned one at that!!!

Being a city girl, I was dumbstruck at how anyone could have managed this; that too in the short time that one took to take an exploratory walk. A, forever mindful of the gaps in my childhood experiences of the kind, decided to show me the contraption he had used work the miracle.

It was very simple fishing device. A thick long piece of wood, a long piece of cloth that had two ends tied to the wooden piece while a third end was held away from the piece of wood to make a makeshift triangle-shaped net. All one had to do, according to him, was to find a rock pool and scare some fish into the area where the net was held.. And hey presto… you had bagged some fish!! I was so impressed with his ingenuity that I decided to take a closer look. And hey presto, the net seemed to have a neat frill along one edge. Realization, though slow, did dawn; he had found some lady’s blouse to use as a net!!! And from the looks of it, it belonged to a pretty gargantuan lady at that!!! So now we have some poor lady wandering the island blouseless!!