She woke-up and rushed to the watering hole. She peered in intensely as if to look for someone other than her in her reflection. ‘Yes, it is still there and last night it has gotten worse.’ Oh, no! She rushed back at the same speed and almost bumped into Dither.

‘See, see it has gotten worse.’

Dither had just woken up wasn’t particularly bright at that time of the morning. ‘Huh?’

‘My black circles, they have become so huge they are soon going to take over my body.’

‘I am not sure ..it looks the same … maybe it has gotten worse’ as he dithered away, Suricata rushed to Dunno, whose head was filled with the ignorance of all the things he didn’t know.

‘Do you know if anybody has died of black circles widening under their eyes?’

‘Dunno’

Do you know if they are a symptom of some other disease?

‘Dunno’

‘Do you think I have an acute case of black-circle-eytes?’

‘Dunno’

In this way, suffering Suricata asked each and every member of her mob about her black circles. Nobody payed her the slightest attention and continued their business of ducking swooping eagles and sunning their bellies.

She went to bed very unhappy that night and woke-up in the morning feeling decidedly sick. She looked around in disgust. Nobody cared. She might as well die. She slunk down and closed her eyes, sulking not sleeping.

For two days the other meerkats ignored her. Not exactly ignored, they didn’t even realise sweet Suricata wasn’t among them. When one of the older aunties tripped over her, injuring all her four toes in the process, that’s when the rest of the mob saw her lying inert, losing weight by the kilo. She was just a bag of skeletons now, clanging inside her skin with the sadness of a dirge.

They crowded around and fished for an explanation. Suricata using the last bit of energy in her, groaned with the softest sadness, ‘My black circles are getting bigger, they are killing me.’ This was serious, they moved a bit away from her and and whispered solutions in low pitched squeaks. Finally, the discussion seemed to die down and the air of a ‘Plan’ enveloped the mob.

One of the meerkats, SoSad, walked daintily up to Suricata. ‘Poor thing, your black circles have gotten worse. Here, have a millipede, they say its legs are good for black-circle-eytes.’

‘Really? It has gotten bad, hasn’t it?’ barked a visibly happier looking Suricata as she chewed on every single leg of that millipede carefully, believing each extremity was a powerful cure.

In this way, the clan filled with fake sympathy but real food cured the hypochondriac Suricata who never ran out of diseases she could suffer from.

Moral: Sympathy works better than pills.



Suricata is drawn by the fabulous Bijoy Venugopal. You can find more of his wonderful stuff here bijoyvenugopal.com