Priceless Diamond

Mom called me to her room while I was doing my homework. As I entered her room she told me to go get ready since one of Dad’s friends from Serbia was coming over for dinner. I nodded and left her room. I went back to my room and sat on my bed remembering it had been 8 years since we moved from Serbia to India but I remembered everything like it was yesterday. 8 years ago my dad decided to volunteer with an NGO in Serbia that fought against poaching of Serbian White tigers. During one of their patrols my father and his team found tiger cubs under a branch, who probably had been hidden their by their mother when the poachers came with their noisy guns. That’s when my father and his team launched a search for the mother, unfortunately they found nothing and believed the poachers had devoured her for their personal fortune, so the entire team decided to keep a cub each till they could take care of themselves in the forest.

 

My father brought home a feeble looking cub home, I a naive kid of 5 didn’t know better then and tugged on the tail of the cub. Even after tugging over and over the cub wouldn’t react.  I decided to give it the name- Diamond because of the diamond shaped birth-mark on it’s forehead.

 

It was like having a sibling. I would steal Diamonds milk, sit on him and rid him like a horse, I would play dog and the bone with him but I never really found the bone because he ate it. It was all fun and games for 2 years when, Diamond grew up and even though he was a mere docile house cat to my parents and I. Our neighbours were very scared so dad decided to go drop him off at the National Park. I remember howling that night with my head on Diamond. The next day when dad came back from dropping Diamond, I felt like a part of my soul was lost after hours of howling my mother came into the room and explained to me that I could go meet Diamond whenever I wanted after all he was just 10 mins away. I calmed down and my life continued every day after school I would go visit Diamond, play with him for an hour, ride his back and he too waited for me. Our bond was not lost. Then one day my father got a call from my grandfather calling him back to India when I felt the ground slip from beneath my feet and all hell broke loose when I realised I won’t be able to see diamond everyday anymore. I reluctantly went to see Diamond on our last day in Siberia that day none of us did anything we just sat under a tree, me clinging on to him like a memory I refused to let go.

 

I snapped out of my past to the ringing of the door bell and realised my father’s friend had arrived and I wasn’t ready. So I quickly threw on a pair of jeans and a black sequence top and strolled out. I welcomed my father and his friend with a smile, we had a brief introduction and then my father’s friend Uncle Sameer handed me a gift. I ran to my room to open it because after all I was still a quirky kid. As I slid the lid of the box a furry carpet appeared. Once it was full out and unwrapped concluded it was a tiger skin rug. This momentarily infuriated me I was against poaching of animals, but this was comforting in a weird way I felt selfish but I just hugged the rug’s face. When I finally opened my eyes I saw the huge diamond mark on the rug’s forehead staring at me.