A Frog’s Tale

The frog lay on his back, gazing up at the clear blue sky overhead. “Not a cloud to be seen”, he sighed. It had been many months since it last rained, and the poor frog was itching to wallow in the mud again. The ground was parched dry and the air was characteristically humid, and the frog spent the daytime dozing under the shade of a tree, away from the prying eyes and poking sticks of the children, and the dreadful rays of the sun. The rains brought a fresh lease of life into him, and the rains also implied the mating season, when he would be the proud father of hundreds of tiny tadpoles. He was not the best of fathers, because he soon lost track of his offspring, a few days after they hatched.

He saw the grasshopper hopping by. “Any chance of rains today?”, he asked the grasshopper. The grasshopper smiled at him, looked up at the clear sky, winked at him and hopped away. What he was to understand from this answer, he himself could not comprehend.

Every year, the frog started exercising about two months before the advent of the monsoons. Although he wasn’t fat even by frogs’ standards, yet he had a tendency to gain weight, and invariably acquired a paunch every summer, due to sleeping too much. But which female frog would look twice at a sloppy, obese frog during the mating season? So he worked out to keep in shape, and performed a daily ritual of hopping and jumping. After all, a frog who could not jump was like a cuckoo who couldn’t sing, in short, disgraceful.

Our frog considered himself to be superior to his fellow brethren. While his peers wasted time frolicking away or chasing insects even if they weren’t hungry, our frog lay on his back and contemplated the future of the frog race, and that of the animal kingdom in general. He wondered why the rains were getting more erratic by the day. He wondered why the air wasn’t as clear as before, why his skin itched when he went out in the sun even for a short while, why his deep baritone was losing its vigour. Subtle changes were taking place in the environment around him, but he knew not why. He thought some invisible power was controlling them all. When he voiced his concern to fellow frogs, they merely shrugged him off, saying it was his mind that was playing tricks. But our frog had an inkling that something somewhere was going wrong, and he vowed to find out who or what that was, and why they were doing so.

But for the time being, lethargy overtook his thought process. So he just lay on his back and looked up at the clear blue sky overhead and sighed for the umpteenth time that day, “Not a cloud to be seen.”

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Tags: Fiction, Frogs, Short story

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