Imagine waking up in the middle of night, walking into the
bathroom still half dizzy with sleep and finding two lizards on two separate
spot on opposite bathroom walls. Both equally fat, ugly and equally disgusting.
That is the stuff nightmares are made of.
Admittedly I had been aware of the presence of one. The
presence of the second came as a surprise. Apparently I had been sighting the
two of them individually and thinking of them as one and the same until that fateful
night when they both decided to reveal themselves to me simultaneously. They
both have their own favorite spots and favorite hiding places and scurry into
their own dark little corners whenever I enter the bathroom. They also tend to leave a mess sometimes in
the form of droppings and loose debris from the false ceiling above.
One of them has been there for years and follows a regular
pattern: hibernates during winter and wakes up in summer. I don’t know if one
of the two current ones is the original one that has been there for years or a
descendant of it because I have no idea how long lizards live and have no
desire to research the matter as I have never been fond of reptiles of any sort.
Not that I come across many reptiles, other than these
ordinary house lizards whose ability to stay adhered to walls, defying gravity, is the
only interesting thing I find about them. It is very rare that a lizard loses
its grip and falls down, but when it does, the human body kind of acts like a
magnet for it and it will fall on top of a person rather than on the floor.
Almost everyone I know who has seen a lizard fall has had one fall on top of
them. It is almost as if they deliberately aim for people when falling.
I have had one fall on top of me too. Although to be fair it
was not the lizard’s fault. It was my husband’s.
There I was, one fine day, standing in the corner of my room
taking something out of my cupboard, completely ignorant of the fact that there
was a big fat lizard high on the wall above me when enters my husband into
the room and yells,
“Don’t move”
And I am like “what ?
why?”
Before I can figure anything out, he takes his Peshawari Chappal
off from his foot and throws it with full force. The heavy slipper flies over
my head and hits the lizard smack in the middle.
The lizard completely taken by surprise loses its grip on
the wall and lands right on top of my head from where it bounces off doing a
kind of inelegant somersault to fall on my chest next. From there, with the speed
of lightening, it slithered down the rest of my body and ran off to God knows
where.
I am no dancer but the skipping and hoping dance like moves
I performed back then, accompanied by a string of shrieking sounds would have
given the most agile of break dancers a run for their money.
My husband for some reason found the whole situation to be
hilarious and could not stop laughing.
As for myself, I didn’t find anything the least bit funny
about it and was furious with my husband for,
A: Hitting
a lizard while I was standing right below it.
B. Asking me
not to move when what he should have yelled was for me to get out of the way
before he hit the damned thing.
His excuse that it was an impulsive act, kind of like a spur
of the moment decision didn’t pacify me much.
To cut the long story short. I don’t have a good history
with lizards and having to share my bathroom with not just one, but two of them,
is not at all pleasant.
Like I said, I am not fond of researching reptiles but these
days I find myself searching the internet trying to find ways and methods to
get rid of lizards ……… permanently.
My particular area of focus is how to kill them while
maintaining a distance of six feet or more.
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