let lemons be angry

The small tank of fish I got for my mother's birthday in february on a smart-aleck whim has now evolved into a mammoth display with uncute long fishes, so big that it's been moved out into the balcony. Whatever keeps my father youthful. He spends his time changing tank water, buying new water plants and rocks, watching youtube lectures on koi, talking to the good fish and disciplining the bad ones, and going to the fish rental shop to return incorrigible fish and small tanks.

I started this fish saga because my mother had always wished for fish. In her vocabulary of personal memory fish meant her father.

When my mother was growing up her father had a large custom-made fish tank for all his goldfish, red ones and black ones and mutated ones with large heads. The tank had two lights, pink and blue, but he would also buy cellophane paper to change the light colours. His obsession grew into twelve other tanks of guppies, one tank for each colour of fish, hundreds of guppies in each. Neighbours would come to view the "tiong bahru aquarium". The guppies multiplied, and he would scoop out the baby guppies and put them in teawater to nurture them. He changed the water for all his tanks every three days. The twelve guppy tanks and the large goldfish tank filled a whole room, wall to wall to wall. The children had to move out and squeeze in one bedroom. And every night he would sit in the middle of the room with the coloured lights on and watch them swimming, hundreds and hundreds of them, a rainbow of schools in water.

One day my mother's youngest brother broke the goldfish tank with a toy. As in all things, it wasn't one child's mishap that caused the end of an affair. But it was what finally broke my grandfather. He lost heart, and gave away all the fish. That was the beginning of his silent years.