July 03, 2008

In my village, they have an interestingly humane method of dealing with rats. Based on the psychology of the individual, the technique takes for granted this species’ essential dumbness: faced with a threat, they’ll scarper and keep going until they hit an immovable barrier into which, being creatures of the soil, they’ll attempt to burrow. Rodents avoid open spaces, perhaps because unwary grandparents were lost to kites and crows.

When faced with a mouse, therefore, hunt up a largish, wide-mouthed jar. Place it along a wall or in a corner along the route the fleeing mouse is likely to take. Announce your presence. If your calculations are correct, the mouse will scurry along the nearest wall and into the jar. Upon hitting the glass, it will not think of reversing and will scrabble uselessly at the barrier while you saunter up and trap it. You are now the proud owner of a captive mouse, which can be released into the wild or be placed on the mantelpiece as the ultimate conversation stopper.

The method actually works.

So it’s a pity I never mentioned it to a lady of my acquaintance, who is terrified of rats. Having spotted one in her kitchen recently, she immediately put out a bucket-load of poisons — who would deal with a rat in a trap? — and closed the outside door firmly, secure in the knowledge that the massacre would take place in the great outdoors.

All the greater was her shock, therefore, when she later espied a hairy brown creature just inside the door, as though trying to creep under it. The preliminaries over — scream, jump on top of the fridge, tremble violently — she barricaded herself in the bedroom, stuffing newspaper under the door to hold off the battalions that were no doubt plotting to gnaw at her bones.

An hour later, once she’d stopped shaking, she returned to the scene of the crime and approached as close as she dared — about ten feet away from the miscreant. It lay still, tail curled under hairy behind, head under the door.

She picked up a griddle to throw at it but realised that it would run into the kitchen instead of out. Then she spent twenty minutes perched on a counter. The situation demanded a closer look, but how?

Technology came to the rescue: she fetched a camera, climbed back onto the counter and zoomed in. The rat lay quite still. All she could see were bristles. Distractedly, she took a couple of photographs.

It must be dead, she realised suddenly. The wretched thing had started dinner on a poison pill, squeezed inside for the entrée and died while trying to get out on a tummy bloated with her food.

Well, that improved matters, but only marginally. She clambered off the counter but couldn’t bear to approach the remains. She imagined the tiny eyes staring at her in lifeless reproach and shuddered. Then she thought it may only have fainted, and sprang back on to the counter.

In desperation, she called the chowkidaar.

“There’s a rat!!!” she stuttered.

“My job is to guard the gate, madam,” said the rugged one.
“No, no … it’s dead, and it’s hairy … and …”
“You’ll have to wait for the sweeper.”
“I can’t. I can’t … it’s beginning to smell. Please … please …”

Perhaps because men from the mountains are taught to respect women, the chowkidaar eventually relented. He arrived with a broom and a thick stick. His shalwar was hitched up above his calves, under which he wore thick-soled military boots. Clearly, this seven-foot Hercules was no great fan of rodents.

Silently, she pointed towards the kitchen. Silently, he gripped the stick and the broom and approached. And if he did this a little reluctantly, no doubt it was because no one likes to stare death in the face.

Then he paused, frowned and regarded the brown lump carefully. He turned and looked at the lady. And, to her utter horror, he stooped, gave the grisly object a poke and picked it up.

Turning towards her with a sad smile that said that all he had ever been taught about women and their fundamental irrationality was true, he said in carefully neutral tones:

“Madam, yeh to aravi hai!”

Bringing herself to look at the object in his palm, the lady finally realised the awful truth: she had spent all night being menaced by a vegetable. A large, brown and hairy vegetable, admittedly, but nevertheless an entirely innocuous aravi or common colocasia.

Post-script: She hasn’t seen a rat since then — the barricades of traps, poisons and rat glue may be responsible — but the chowkidaar has taken to giving her husband the pitying looks deserved by someone who lives with a lunatic.