A Hippopotamus for Every Holiday

Although he said all his daughters were his favorite, Sonnalli knew she was her father’s favorite favorite. He rarely called her “Sonnalli", instead using his pet name for her, chand, Hindi for moon. "I don't need a lamp”, he laughed, reading to her one night, “you are my light, little Chand.”

Sonnalli liked walking down to the market herself, feeling grown up at eight years old, and her father, Aarav, knew that the neighbors would keep a close eye on her.

Brimming with curiosity, Sonnalli would roam her village and bring Aarav whatever treasure she found along the way. Wildflowers growing along the road, pastries shopkeepers would give her, even stones she'd find that piqued her imagination. “Look!’, she’d say, presenting a lumpy rock, “it looks like a star, from your moon!”

She also loved to read, anything from fairy tales to the volume of encyclopedias Aarav kept in his library. Sonnalli especially loved reading about animals, and her favorite was the hippopotamus, mostly because it was fun to say. She’d even sing an old Christmas song about hippopotami year round, making up her own lyrics:

I want a hippopotamus for Christmas, but any other holiday would do! 

Diwali would nice, they're sold at half the price!

They’d eat up all the garbage and they’d scare off all the mice!

Sonnalli also loved hippopotami because she’d read that they'd lived in India, just like her and her family. But that was years ago, Aarav explained, and India’s native hippos were now extinct. The only hippos in India now were in zoos. 

Aarav wanted Sonnalli to see a hippopotamus up close, and had taken her the zoo for her last birthday. The zoo had only a single hippo, an enormous one swimming in a pond in an enclosure. Sonnalli felt badly for it, kept in confinement, no hippo friends or other animals to play with.

One day, Sonnalli was walking back home from the market, and saw what she thought was a squat, dark-colored dog a few feet ahead. But as she walked closer, Sonnalli saw it was not a dog at all. It was the size of a big dog, but had no fur, and its ears looked like little shells. Sonnalli remembered the pictures in her books, and the gigantic hippo she’d seen at the zoo. This was a baby hippo! "Are you lost?” she asked it. It answered only with a wet grunt. You must have escaped from the zoo, she thought, the big hippo must have had a baby. “You must miss your family! Do you want to come stay with mine?” Again, she received no answer apart from a grunt.

Sonnalli began walking again, gesturing the baby hippo to follow, but it stayed put. “Come, Hope! Helen...Holly” - Sonnalli was sure the hippo’s name began with an H. Sonnalli walked on, waving her arm to coax it. “....Heather?" But the hippo looked away, more interested in munching the tall grass on the side of the road.

Sonnalli held out the basket she’d been carrying home from the market, filled with fruits and vegetables. That got the hippo’s attention. Slowly, the hippo began to follow Sonnalli. Sonnalli had seen the hippo’s teeth when it was eating the grass. She was smart enough to keep the basket far ahead of the hippo, as she was sure one gulp could take the whole basket, and maybe Sonnalli's hand, with it.

Sonnalli and Henrietta, she’d decided on the name as she walked, quickly made it to Sonnalli’s home, with the basket and Sonnalli safely out of chomp’s reach.

Sonnalli ran to her father, “Look! She’s just like in the book! And she's so nice! Can we keep her?” Aarav hated to disappoint Sonnalli. “Sonnalli", he said, “you know hippos don’t live here anymore. She must have escaped from the zoo, and her mother must be terribly worried.” 

Sonnalli replied “but it was so awful there! Closed in and no friends to play with."

“Chand, we can’t. She must be a new addition to the zoo, and she has her parents. How do you think I would feel if someone found you! I’d be lost without my moon!"

Aarav said, “Come in, we will call the zoo together. I bet they will let you visit any time you want as a reward.”

But, they called the zoo, even a second zoo many miles away, and learned that no one was missing a baby hippo. The zookeepers had not even heard of adult hippo missing that could have had a baby. Aarav asked the zoo if they would come examine and adopt the baby hippo, but they doubted his story. The earliest they could send someone down, they said, was four months away.

“We can’t just leave her out there alone” Sonnalli cried, “she could go hungry, or get hurt. We have plenty of land, and I can feed her!”

“Okay, Chand”, said Aarav, “she can stay, but you have to understand that this is temporary. She belongs with other hippos and professionals who can really take care of her. So, promise me, in four months, no tears, only joy for good memories.”  Sonnalli promised, and Aarav prepared as best he could for their new pet.

Aarav carefully lead the hippo to a pen they used to use for their cows. Long ago, Aarav had gifted the cows to his oldest daughter upon her marriage. The pen, with plenty of room to roam and a small pond built in for cooling off on the hot summer days, was perfect.

The zoo’s sense of skepticism proved well founded. Within her first days, it became clear that Henrietta was not a true hippo, at least not purely hippo. She was more part hippo, part neurotic mess.  She would not eat unless you stayed in the pen with her and ate yourself. Sonnali first tried dropping melons, heads of lettuce, even gigantic breadfruit into the pen, but Henreitta just looked up at her. 

Sonnali then tentatively opened the gate to the pen, walked in, and waved towards the meal with her arm, the way she had when she first tried to coax Henrietta to follow her. Again, Sonnalli was met only with a wet grunt, dousing her legs with hippo spit. “Yuch!’”, she laughed, “hippo slime!”

Sonnali then picked up an apple and took a bite. “See”, she said, “yum!" Henrietta then dove into the feast.

Over the next days, it became routine. If Sonnalli delivered Henrietta’s food and and tried to leave the pen, Henrietta would pause, look up at her, then back away from the food. It was only when Sonnali would return to her side that Henrietta would resume eating. “You're either very social, very polite, or crazy”, Sonnali said to her.

One day, Sonnalli forgot to close the gate to the pen. Henrietta escaped and made her way to a shed a few feet away, where Aarav kept tools, pantry items and old toys and clothes and the like that his family had outgrown, but that he could not bear to throw away. 

By the time Sonnalli turned around to hear the ruckus coming from the shed, Henrietta had found and eaten a bag of trail mix, canned cherries. part of a cell phone, a remote from an old TV, a sack of sugar, baby shoes, and for dessert, a toilet plunger.

Sonnalli caught Henrietta in the act of eating the plunger and burst out laughing. The cherries, the trail mix, even the sack of sugar she understood. Henrietta always did have a sweet tooth. But the plunger? Maybe she was trying to unstick the cell phone, the baby shoes, and the remote.

Henrietta’s eating habits were not her only quirky trait. The hippo Sonnalli had seen at the zoo had loved its giant, murky pond. But Henrietta would not set hoof near the pond in her pen. No matter how much Sonnalli tried to encourage her, even wading into the water herself, Henrietta refused.   She seemed to be the only hippo in history afraid of swimming.

Although Henrietta avoided her pond, she loved water itself. Whenever it would rain, Henrietta would run around the pen, mouth wide open, catching rain drops. 

One day, Sonnalli let Henrietta out of the pen to clean it. Aarav was watering the crops at the time, and Henrietta, rather than eating the crops, played in the sprinkler with reckless abandon. 

This, too, became routine. Since she would not swim in the pond, Sonnalli decided that bath time would consist of a rollick through the sprinklers. When the in-ground sprinklers came on, Henrietta, released from her pen, would run around the field in a hippo version of "puppy zooms", try to catch the sprays of water in her mouth, and would try to follow the water back underground once the cycle is through. Henrietta would then would return to her pen, roll around in the dirt, and before Sonnalli could back away, Henrietta would treat her to one of her signature “look how far I can spray water” shakes, covering the pen, Sonnalli, and the wall of the nearby shed in a spattering of mud that would have made Jackson Pollack proud. Sonnalli wanted to be mad at Henrietta for the mess, but Henrietta turned her head up and gave Sonnalli a look that said “‘Okay, so I got dirty again, but c’mon, tell me that wasn’t worth it!” 

The zoo never did get back to Aarav, and by that point, he did not care. When the four months passed and Sonnalli asked her him if they had to now give Henrietta up, Aarav did not want to call the zoo to remind them. Henrietta was part of the family. So, he, said, as only a dad joke could, “No, Chand, she is your storybook come true, and they lived hippoly ever after.”