The Squirrel’s greatest joy is dancing in the forest with the Rabbit – her beloved friend and equal of heart. While the duo is inseparable, fate has other ideas: the feisty Squirrel is forcibly married to a wealthy boar and the solitary Rabbit enlists in a monastery.
Years later, a brief, tragic reunion finds them both transformed by personal defeats. And yet, to each other, they are unchanged, and their private world-where sorrow registered as rapture and wit concealed loss-is just how they had left it.
From Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s new book, The Rabbit and the Squirrel we extract three unique lessons.
With a true friend, there is no pressure to perform; you can be yourself.
“They were both usually playing out lines, hamming it up over a drink, tap-dancing in taverns. But when they were together, alone, they felt no need for this.”
Spending time with friends has immense value
“The only real gift you might give, or receive, was presence. So she had hunted out the Rabbit—to go dancing with him one last time.”
You must live every moment you can and without regret
“But this is also what he learned from her: that one must inhabit the present moment without regret, and to embrace the ordinary as truly spectacular: everything, after all, was only life’s invitation to live.”
A story of thwarted love, and an ode to the enduring pleasures of friendship, The Rabbit and the Squirrel is a charmed fable for grown-ups, in which one life, against all odds, is fated for the other. For more posts like this one, follow Penguin India on Facebook!
