Where Hojmola comes from

Whenever Dad threw us kids out before sunrise for our morning jogs, I am the only kid in my family, who is not grumpy. My neighbourhood is plagued with stray mongrels and they always wreck havoc in the mornings, frightening even the grownups. Ladies of my neighbourhood who have the immensity of waking up at 5.00 in the morning and fetching milk from the numerous home dairies in nearby village are the victims most of the times, some of whom always spill milk, while shaking off these mongrels off them.

But I am always at ease among these vicious conspirators against humanity, most of whom I know by their names. Names I have given them. One hefty dog, which is considered the king of the pack, is named Lalu, owing to its lustrous reddish brown color. But my father suspects my inspiration for the name. He told me that you cannot name a dog after a person. But, I am sticking to the name. Anyways, lalu is unlikely to come in contact a lot with my father, and even if he does, it’s not as if lalu is going to introduce himself by his first name. There are five puppies too, whom I took to a tank nearby today to teach them swimming. When I threw them in the muddy water, taking a cue from my own first lessons in swimming, they started swimming like professionals. I think those puppies had taken their basic lessons before I got acquainted with them.

While returning from the tank we all went to a jungle nearby, through which a big canal flows. There are a lot of rabbits living there among the grasses on either side of the canal. My idea was to hunt a rabbit, so that the whole pack could enjoy some fresh meat, excluding me off-course. But the thing is that they were way too fast for any of us. By the time we reached near a hole, they were gone only to peep out of some other hole 50 meters away. Then we found a lot of hajmolas lying on the grass, and that how I knew, where they came from. Though I could not find a tree on which these grew.

I gathered myself a fistful. The time I was about to taste my first, I remembered what Mom was telling me the other day about not eating one before a wholesome breakfast. I am fortunate that I listened to my Mom’s advice today, because in the evening, there was this chapter in my biology book about rabbits eating their own faeces and how it looks like hajmola.