How the Lizards made an enemy out of me...

I have not always detested lizards. There was a time when we were ... friends. The hostility that I harbor towards them today is a natural instinct that was born out of a certain untoward incident in my childhood.

Before that day, everything was "hunky-dory" between us, as to say. We were in a state of peaceful co-existence. I even used to include them in my paintings on occasion during my drawing classes. Sometimes we would even enjoy meals together, myself enjoying "Chhole Puri", while they gorged on all the delicious mosquitoes and other insects. There was just one unspoken rule. We never used to enter the other's territory; that is, I would never crawl on the walls, and they would never crawl on my bed. Very simple and straight forward.

I was all of 8 years old on that fateful night. Like the good boy I have always been, I finished my homework at 9 PM and prepared to go to sleep (those were the days when Ekta Kapur had not hijacked the "after-dinner prime time television", people slept early, and woke up early). I put my notebooks in my schoolbag, and put my pencils in my "Arabian Nights" pencil box (which by the way I own and use to this day). I switched off the tube light, and went to bed to sleep.

It must have been 15-20 minutes since sleep engulfed me, when I noticed something on my bed, below my pillow. Still very much in my sleep, I took it in my hand and felt it. It seemed like a rubber (eraser). "Oh, I must have forgotten it on the bed when I was packing my bag", thought I. So, I rose up from the bed, and promptly switched on the light to put the rubber back into the bag. As the tube light flickered before finally getting steady, I realised, to my horror, what was in my hand was no innocent and inanimate rubber, it was in fact, a big slimy lizard. Just as realisation struck me, the lizard promptly leapt from my hand on to the bed, and started roaming on it from one edge to the other, as if trying to make a point, that the lizards now owned the whole place. That I had become a refugee in my own territory. I was both furious and afraid at the same time. It is difficult to put that feeling into words. I called my mother, and together we encaged the over-ambitious lizard, in an empty bucket. I wanted to kill the little guy for its audacity, but my mother pacified me, and we finally eased it outside our home.

That night, I had a troubled sleep. My territory was under siege by a species more than 10 times smaller than me. Over the next few weeks, the Elder lizards came again and again to apologise for the unruly actions of that rebellious lizard; they reminded me of the peaceful relationship, and the camaraderie our empires once enjoyed, but I wouldn't be talked into resumption of peace in any way. Finally they gave up.

And thus, till this day, we have been in a state of cold war. I have experimented throughout the period of my school days, the impact of various materials (such as cold water, compressed air) for loading into weapons against lizards and certain sonic and/or visual arrangements that tend to scare them away. They on their part have encroached on my turf on countless occasions and continue to do so to this day.

Since my childhood, I have turned into an infinitely mature, patient and peaceful person, but put a lizard in front of me and the dormant violent streak comes to the fore...

Note: This post is a pat of the continuing "The Incidental Criminal" Series.