Back Home, Back to the Zoo

There lived in a zoo a lion called Simba. His beautiful wife's name was Bimba. They were provided with spacious cages and were fed three times a day. Daily, they were allowed to wander free in the garden attached to their cage for a couple of hours.

But Simba was not happy with the dull zoo life. He missed his life in Africa. He constantly pined for the hills, jungles, and rivers of the place where he was born and brought up. Finding a prey and getting the same after a chase was an everyday thrill in the Dark Continent.

One day, he told Bimba that he had enough of the wretched life in the zoo. "Why can't we escape from here?" he asked.

Bimba quickly admonished him. "This is not our native Africa. We are strangers here. How can we survive here?"

Simba turned a deaf ear to Bimba's words of caution and went ahead with his plan to escape. Bimba told him she was not going with him, since she had her cubs to look after.

One evening, the cage keeper forgot to lock the door of Simba's cage properly. Next morning, when he came to feed Simba, the cage was empty. The staff of the zoo conducted a search, but it ended up fruitless. Simba the lion just disappeared.

The fugitive lion found himself in an endless, dry, deserted landscape. He had not a drop of water to drink. For four days, he wandered here and there. Years of zoo life had made him lose touch with the art of hunting; he could not even catch a mouse.

On the fifth day, he entered the outskirts of a town where a traveling circus was camping. Before he could reach the water tub kept there, he fell unconscious.

When he regained his consciousness, he found himself in a cage. A tough guy came and threw a bucket of water on his body. When he got up groggily, the same guy brought a lump of meat and pushed it through a feeding aperture. Simba swallowed the thing ravenously and drank a gallon of water.

Since the usual lion which the circus had so far died suddenly, the manager considered the discovery of Simba as a God-given replacement. The ringmaster started to train Simba immediately.

He stabbed him with a spear and flogged him with a whip. By the time poor Simba learnt to perform, he sustained scars all over his body. The quality and quantity of food he got in the circus made him long for what he got in the zoo. He regretted having jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

Even while he lost all hope of going back to the zoo, a miraculous coincidence occurred. One evening, while the lion show was going on, seated on a ringside chair was the curator of the zoo from which Simba had escaped. Simba and his previous master recognized each other instantly.

Simba leapt from his stool and started pawing the iron net that separated the arena from the audience gallery. One long gaze into Simba’s eyes was enough for the curator to confirm that the poor circus lion was none other than the lion that had escaped from his zoo.

Then, things happened very fast. An hour later, Simba was shifted to a cage, which in turn was loaded onto a truck. It became clear to Simba that he was being taken back to the zoo.

Bimba, his wife, and their cubs, Kumba and Hamba, were glad to see him back home, back at the zoo. The curator, who came to look at Simba, told the feeder-cum-keeper of the cage, "Now, even if you keep the cage wide open, Simba will not step out of it. He has learnt his life’s lesson."

Turning to Simba, he said, "Simba dear, one important thing you should know: where there is peace, there is freedom."