Goodbye, Aristurtle

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I awoke this morning to a world made grey by the haze. Although 'haze' is too euphemistic a word to talk about the choking, polluting cloud that drifts over from the burning forests in Indonesia. It is more like smog – a more sinister word, a word that sounds like entrapment, blindness and dirt. The smog we have here is soft and blurs the edges of the sun and makes the buildings in the distance grainy, but also means waking up with a scratchy throat and inhaling the smell of ‘burnt’ with every breath.

I can’t imagine what it is like to burn a forest. To set a torch onto green, life giving plants and see them crinkle and curl up in smoke as they blacken and smoulder. To encourage the spread of the flames as it takes on a life of its own, leaping from tree to tree in chase of the squirrels and birds that flee, making the forest floor an inferno. To cause cracked death everywhere.
Smog or no smog, life keeps going. Since I was only due into work late today, I had time in the morning to do something Mum and I have been meaning to do since we returned from England – free our turtles.

Technically, they are red-eared slider terrapins, but because of the contemplative nature of one of them he was named Aristurtle, and since then to call then anything but turtles seemed an affront to his title. We received Aristurtle (initially called OJ) as a thank you gift from a couple who stayed with us for a while. (PSA: Never give animals as gifts.) We had no idea what to do with that small, scuttle-y creature. It had a small tank and we placed a rock into it as a consolation. Welcome to the family.
I recall making obstacle courses with lego bricks and trying to entice OJ through them with rancid-smelling slivers of terrapin food. He wouldn’t budge, and it was not too long after that that he was named Aristurtle. While he was contemplative, he was certainly not kind. Afraid he was feeling lonely, we bought him a little friend, a tiny turtle from the fish and aquatic life shop in Ghim Moh market. Aristurtle ate all the food we put into their shared tank and the little baby turtle died overnight, un-named.

And so when we got Mikey we made sure to separate him and Aristurtle. But this time it was for Aristurtle’s safety. Mikey was about twice as big as Aristurtle – he’d grown up with our neighbour, Ali, who was leaving for Australia and needed to give his turtle to someone. That someone was my brother. (PSA: Never offload your pet onto someone else if you can help it. Especially when all you know about that someone is their ability to play football and not their ability to take care of another life.)

And so Mikey and Aristurtle lived side by side in two tanks on our balcony for years, serving as silent listeners to my ‘hanging-out-the-washing’ concerts and providing novelty to the children who come to my Mum for speech therapy sessions. They grew, as we all do, and when I came back from England and looked into their tank I knew they needed more space.

And so this morning Mum and I walked, with the two of the min big blue buckets, to a nearby pond and let them loose. I released Mikey nearer to shore, among calmer waters where he stayed, treading water, before he disappeared into the dark undergrowth of pond weed and leaves. Aristurtle just sank to the bottom on the pond, his legs anad head tucked into his shell, refusing to adapt to change. He stayed at the bottom long enough that we thought he was dead from the shock of it all. But gradually he poked his head out, then his legs, and then shot to the surface (the fastest I’ve ever seen him move) and then begun swimming around, occasionally stopping and casting a sage eye on his surroundings – this is all very new.