When Khelu and I used to share a room, we furnished it with lots of things. Done with everything else, we thought about having a pet. I had always wanted to keep turtles but never succeeded in doing so at my own home because my parents would go crazy about keeping a fish let alone an amphibian. So, when I suggested to Khelu about it, he gave it a thumbs-up and we got ourselves two turtles.

On the way, we thought about names for our latest room-mates. I was still obsessed with Adam Sandler’s pet in the movie “50 first dates”, Chyapo, so I decided on it for my turtle. Khelu thought he would call his Thingu (turtle in Manipuri).

It was cool to hang around with our new room-mates. They were slow and whenever they pissed, they would hide inside their shells and then slowly came out without too much fuss. We played. The racing was the most fun part. Chyapo wouldn’t move at all. Small Thingu would be really energetic once out of his glass. But Chyapo was cautious.

We soon became famous as “Turtle Dudes”. We were so inspired by our new friends that we started a radio over the LAN and called it Turtle Radio. We named our fictitious tech firm, Turtle Inc. And I started calling myself Turtle. My brother called himself Turtle’s bro.

But one sad day, Chyapo bade us farewell. We knew the end was near because he was on an infinite hunger strike. He chose the Gandhian style of revolution, but never understood that in today’s world nobody cares about a peaceful course of action. You need to make sounds and wreck some havoc to get heard.

Thingu, inspired by his fellow comrade, soon followed suit. We were so engulfed by our name and fame that these little guys had given us, we forgot to take care of them. We forgot that we were adored for learning to live with species of different kinds and not because our pets were different or we were cool.

In a symbiotic environment, it is essential that the interests of both the parties be taken care of. We failed to take care of theirs’ just because they would not speak up. This is a tribute to all Chyapos and Thingus who have been promised a better future but have been denied just that because they are too small and dumb for anyone to listen to.