A poor farmer in rural Maharashtra has built an unlikely friendship with a wild cat fish whose life he saved a year ago.
Prakash Patil, 54, visits a local pond in his village Yede Machindra in Sangli district everyday and calls out for the fish. Amazingly, the fish surfaces, swims close, even lets him pull it out of water.

Patil calls the fish ‘Narayana,’ another name for popular Hindu deity Lord Vishnu.

He recalls that the unlikely friendship started on 14 July, 2016, on the eve of ‘Ashada Ekadashi,’ an auspicious day in the Hindu calendar.

A neighbouring farmer in his village told Patil that a fish had washed up into his farm along with the water released from a canal, and asked him to take it away. The neighbour, a vegetarian, thought Patil would take the fish home and eat it.

Patil found the fish, which was stranded in a puddle of water, alive but inert. He carried it home in a plastic container with water and was amazed to see it reviving. He then shifted it to a water tank and fed it for over a month.

As the fish grew in size and turned very active, he released it in the local pond.

A few days later, he started noticing the fish again in the pond. It would draw close to the bank whenever he approached and once even jumped into a bucket he was using to draw water.

The fish and the man started spending more time with each other and it gradually grew confident enough to allow him to touch it and even lift it out of water.
Patil, a devout Hindu, thinks that fish represents a form of Lord Vishnu.

(full story with Newsflare team)