Bablu the fish always had one dream he wanted to fly. He had expressed this desire to his parents and to his friends. His parents didnt pay too much attention or maybe they did not want to discourage his imagination so they just encouraged a little sometimes and on other times just ignored him and changed the subject. His friends made fun of him and told him that flying is only for birds. So he had very few friends in the real sense other than only one. Nanu was the fittest of all fishes of their age. He had the most agile fins in all and excelled in all athletic activities that fishes do.
Nanu was so full of confidence that he wanted everyone else to have that confidence as well. So when he met Bablu for the first time in a plankton hunting class he felt fascinated with an under-confident fish with very brittle almost chubby fins having a dream to fly in the air. Their friendship was based on aspirations of both of them wanting to be a little like each other. Actually Bablu wanted to be more like Nanu.
Bablu and Nanu used to go the shallowest of waters to watch the birds fly. They tried using their fins to propel them into the air but even with Nanu’s athletic ability and agility he was able to just break the surface of the water and they also found out that they could not breathe with dry gills. Bablu’s passion did not decrease even after that. He found out all about possibilities of flying from all possible corners of the shelf.
He went to every fish he could find to be having any possible knowledge about flying. He found many experienced and scholarly fishes. The scholars actually knew everything about flight but only about a bird’s flight nothing to help in his flight of dreams. The experienced ones told him how they have survived so long on the shelf by not going into shallow waters where they can get caught by predator birds or fish collectors who come in their wooden shells and they never venture into deep ocean either.
In the end he only had one option left to go to one-fin mehta who was an out of senses fool fish who had lost his one fin as an accident since which he would just keep mumbling random speech all day. Bablu went to see mehta everyday and only a few words were decipherable from him each day. In his pursuit of mehta he had even abandoned meetings with Nanu and their visits to the shallows slowly stopped.
After 26 days of February visits he finally deciphered that the story that mehta was telling was a story of actual flight that he took with a bird but it was not only a flight it was an attack and he had only survived because the bird lost his grip on him because his brittle chubby fin broke and injured the bird . Bablu assumed that mehta lost his mind because of the trauma and lack of water on his gills. He also came to the conclusion that this was only possible way of him to fly and he might not be as lucky as mehta.
Days went by but his passion just grew. He told the story to Nanu who found it possible but concluded that only luck saved mehta so it was not a transferable scenario but deep down he knew something was cooking in Bablu’s mind. So after much deliberation Nanu told his own parents who thought it was such a funny party story that they made fun of Bablu and his parents in the annual shelf party.
Betrayed by his only friend and being the reason of ridicule of his parents he was feeling like being on the bottom of the ocean. His desire to free himself of all the bonds and fly away became stronger and stronger. So he made plans with Nanu to get back to the old ways and visit the shallows again. He knew what he wanted to do now, he was so sure of the way he wanted to achieve his dream that he had not given much thought to the escape plan, he was not sure he even wanted to escape.
From the beak of the swan the whole world looked so beautiful , he had imagined world would look smaller but now he realised that the world was much bigger than he had thought and had more colors than he had imagined and breathlessness was not bothering him too much . With his dream coming true and with such an out of body experience he surrendered himself to the moment.
conimpressions 