G’kak! in the Dark
Every house of Dhanukha panchayat sheltered things that went bump, pitter-pat, scurry, croak, squeak, trill, slither, rustle, rattle, hop, creak, gnaw-gnaw and dig-dig-dig in the dark– not a single sort of creature. By day there were things that scurried on the walls, screamed and nested in the thatch, buzzed in the ear, hissed, blinked slowly, dropped, hopped and hung swaying from the eaves. These were easier to know. Living alone was never an option, which must have been a source of luster to the legend of holy men who dwelt in solitude.
Mentioned elsewhere, but worth another glance, were rats–mussa. They mined and tunneled clay floors and any wall thick enough to afford passage, being capable of eventually boring through brick. Generally reclusive by day, they could sometimes be seen foraging beneath a table, veritably underfoot. It is not only the foolish notion of insufficiently hardened young girls that their tails look scaley and horrible. I recall sharing a table with an well grown member of the clan in a Janakpur restaurant which had only one Michelin star –no, I lie, it did not have a star. The rodent had grown bold over the years and thought nothing of my hastily snatched up foot. However, the habits of self-indulgence and living in dank tunnels, possibly holding its bidi with its caudal member, had caused cankers on the creature’s tail. During impetigo season, they looked exactly like the sort of thing that would grow on a toe after a good savaging, so I kept my chhapal-shod toes well up on the seat. A meaningful glance directing the waiter’s attention to the rat, produced a significant motion of the shoulders, modified by a head gesture with neck twist, indicating that management was aware of the situation, and that one should not to allow giddy, western cultural conventions to carry one off. Rats of the sub-continent have made much of one of their kind appearing in cameo with Lord Ganesh, in all of his manifestations–poster, statue, filmi...
The mussa of Govindapur were a numerous clan, and fierce in their way. But they had an enemy in a sort of giant shrew which would kill or drive rats out of a house and replace it with an equal number of its own sort. That these were actually rat-sized shrews is not certain, though they could be seen not to be rodents by their rows of needle-sharp teeth–a view they were eager to provide. In the dark of a moonless night, they could be heard to be carnivores. I never learned the name for these creatures in Maithele; my friends lumped them casually under the designation of mussa, but they were giant shrews to the English-speaking population–both of us. It is not ruled out that they may have been pygmy wolverines.
Heinze went so far as to purchase a rat-trap for his one-room dwelling. A mouse trap is a wan, spring loaded device for snapping the life out of lesser races, without the law. What he found in some Janakpur dokaan was just short of a man-trap–a heavy metal version with Mercedes springs that looked fully capable of taking a toe and so he had to place it far beneath some piece of furniture to protect his night-blind feet. Bigger and stiffer than week-old cheese-on-rye, the trap really did not have to be baited as it was larger than the focus of attention of most rats and they were as likely to blunder into it as Heinze was. The f-fTHWHACK! it made in the middle of the night was enough to wake the soundest sleeper. Such angry screeching from the rodent suddenly inconvenienced by its wiry embrace, as it threw trap and self about the dungeon dark, produced dreams that harked back to the Pre-Raphaelites, at least. We had all been provided with what was laughingly called a tool kit, before our abandonment by Peace Corps Central. Phitchkas, screwdriver, I learned from the village mistry, was correct terminology for the two-pound, two-foot, two-handed item my friend called a lahua-khanthi, thunder-nail. In a land without screws, it made a dramatic first impression of the concept, leading to exaggerated conclusions when English-familiar co-workers worked out the meaning of the expletive, "Well, screw you!"
On a visit, I watched the trembling beam of Frank’s torch as he tiptoed from the safety of his mosquito net toward the angry sounds of conflict, his thunder nail raised and ready. A single blow dispatched the creature...not at all. As Milton said of Satan’s end, "A thousand blows rained on his head, he lived to feel but ten." Something like that. It sounded like a Mafia hit-job. Apparently no one gets to be Big Mussa on the basis of a sensitive nature. Draped over the end of his thunder nail, Frank took the broken corpse outside, so as not to have to listen to quarrelsome cannibals the rest of the night.
WHACK! The second screech made it sound as if these rodents were lining up like Billy Goat Gruff and his brothers, in ascending order, to see who could beat the trap. Heinze was up like an angry bandar-lok, phitchkassing the stuffing out of the second one. The third one resembled a woodchuck stuck in a ground-wire and the fourth was more like a beaver wearing a nose-ring than anything else. He carted them, one by one, out to the beaned-row in the garden and collapsed back in bed trembling with post-adrenal let down. He didn’t set the trap again. "Quit winners," he might have been thinking. By morning, either they had recovered or something had carted the bodies away. There were large ants in dry season...
Labyrinths dug by rats were attractive to other creatures. Toads found these holes offered protection from the light and from predators. They also gave access to the tastily bug-filled house interior, where a kerosine lamp concentrated moths very conveniently, from the toad point of view. Snakes occasionally emerged from the tunnels, where they sought rats and perhaps toads. But snakes were fewer and more wary. In theory, they were a natural control on the rodent population, which otherwise got into anything not stored in tin. In practice, snakes might be poisonous and a more effective natural control on the human population.
In Govindapur it was forbidden to speak the name, saph, or serpent, as it was understood to call the name was to call the creature. For the same reason the word, bhut, or ghost was rarely uttered and never in the dark. A snake, if it must be spoken of, was lamkhira–the long insect. Apparently they do not know they are called that and I trust this will not alert them. My attempts to feather out the argument that the snake was the farmer’s friend using my spottily fledged vocabulary, foundered on the weighing-in-balance of cobra versus mussa, which could clearly be seen in the air over a farmer’s head.
Local attitudes toward snakes were ambiguous, nonetheless. The cobra, Naga, was the companion of Lord Siva, who had demonstrated his immunity to poison by swallowing an ocean of it with no more effect than to have turned blue, so snakes had that to their credit. On the other hand, both krait and cobra were found in the village. The poison of either was as deadly as a sword through the heart, so villagers did not long contemplate the nature of any legless creature. They either fled or lashed out with anything at hand, theology be damned.
There wasn’t always anything handy, however. One day, I was called urgently from my room by a group of farmers who had surrounded a cobra about fifteen feet from my door in a plowed field. In the circle of men, the snake did not know which way to turn, though it would likely have reached a decision fairly soon. Though the village was rich with kodalo, lathi, and other long-handled implements with cutting edges, we were all empty-handed. I had an umbrella in the house, but it was clearly unequal to the job at hand.
The field had been plowed and lay in clumps, baked hard by the sun. One of the men snatched up a lump of clay the size of his head and ran in toward the snake, which reared and turned to meet him, hood spread. He brought the hard clay down with a slam which would have broken a coconut. The cobra emerged from beneath the broken lump to raise its head angrily. When it opened its mouth, a bright red bubble of blood filled it. Three or four more slamming clods put an end to the cobra’s movement, but no one went close to make sure it was dead. Lord Siva would send drought and disease anyway.
Just why the mongoose was not a popular pet, I have never been able to figure.
Reading by lamp-light subjected the scholar to many distractions. Insects were drawn to the light and little green lizards, girgit, were drawn across the walls to the insects. The rustling and whacking of a gagging lizard beating a roach-thing against the wall, hopefully into condition to be swallowed head first, wings extended, had only the PC paperback book locker for competition.
The Bible makes mention of toads in plague quantities, but this had always seemed a fairly innocuous curse to visit upon a persecuting monarch. I can not imagine that the Jews of WWII era Europe would have chosen that to send against Hitler and his minions. If you picked a toad up, it did not cause warts, incidentally–it urinated in the hand which held it, which was bad enough for most. Any snake which lived on a diet of toads had surely worked up a load of bad karma in multiple previous lives. The rat tunnels must have been packed solidly with fist-sized toads, because the early rains brought them out in such carpets that walking at night was hazardous. Their fierce humping in every wet nook was just another thorn in the virginal crown of bachelorhood. But the sweet trill, which was the song of the males, seemed all the sweeter for its incongruity with the visual impression they made.
By day, any thatch roof came alive with nesting sparrows. Baggardi, the black bibbed English sparrow or Eurasian weaver finch, had arrived in the panchayat during my friend, Sri Kisun’s childhood. He told me of going with others to view the first ones as a curiosity. By my time, they had multiplied and filled the earth to the extent that flocks of hundreds descending on a rice crop near harvest would bring small boys to their feet, flinging anything to hand, in the– mostly futile–effort to protect the crop. Sparrows liked to burrow into thatch for their nests, and disdaining neither to carry coals to Newcastle, bhat to Birganj, chawal to Chitwan nor gobar to Govindapur,manically industrious baggardi could be seen pulling long strands of straw out of one roof to stuff in the nest hole of another. It did nothing for a good roof’s’ watertight qualities. Had baggardi been larger, they could have been hunted. Had they been fewer they could still have been eliminated. But they were functionally insect-like in their swarms, too small and numerous to combat. Skewered, with their feathers toasted off on hot coals, they were served in rakhsi shops, a cheap snack, but it would have taken a very hard drinking population to make any noticeable dent in the sparrow population. Meanwhile, the thatch of the nation suffered. They would even force their way between clay roof-tiles to build a nest which would drip straw, guano and rain messily inside the house.
This and a steady drizzle of clay plaster, straw and spiders up to half-dollar size made covering food and regularly sweeping floors essential. An abandoned room could be six-inches deep in detritus after as many months.
Like politics, PC volunteerism made strange bed fellows. On visit to Gary Shostack’s digs, down by the Janakpur airport, I shared half his bed platform for the night. Sensibly enough, it was pushed head first against the room’s window, to enjoy any puff of air which the night might offer. The building in which Gary had been given a room was of brick–pakha, ek dham, the likes of which did not exist where I dwelt. To the window frame, Gary had fixed some of the roll of window-screen which made the largest item in the PC tool kit. The wide masonry sill of the window was sloped gently toward the outside, to drain monsoon rains through a hole in the bottom of the wooden window frame. Sleeping in my boxer shorts and a tight suit of prickly heat, I had begun to doze lightly there beside Gary when I felt something tug sharply at my boxers. By flashlight I discovered a pair of holes made by the front teeth of some passing rat. Gary explained calmly that the drainage hole in the window served as the main passage for mussa and he did not dare to block it, because there were always a number of them inside, which might become desperate if they felt trapped. Well, yes, I agreed that hole-in-the-shoe reasoning–once your foot is wet, you don’t want to fix it as it lets the water out–had a certain inevitability to it. The rest of the night was enlivened by the pitter-patter of little feet across my legs and chest. Lying there I could identify all the sounds of the night, the dropping of spiders, repeated scrabbling among the cooking gear, the whine of mosquitoes. And beyond the room, I heard night birds cry and seaw, singing jackals, in their eternal argument with barking village dogs. It was a hard-earned familiarity and it gave a sense of belonging.
Recently, here on my box spring and mattress, I awoke in the night to, "G’kak! G’kak!" a sound from beneath my bed. My wife, who is not susceptible to night visitations, slept on. It was a sound I knew, but couldn’t place. I ran through the list of possible creatures, mischievous cat, lost possum, invading corn-snake, forgotten grandchild...before it came to me–of course! Leaning over the edge, I peered beneath the old brass bed to see a small tyrannosaurus rex, stalking about. "Calvin?" I said. The tyrannosaurus paused and gave me a beady eye. "Where’s Hobbs?" I asked, softly, so as not to wake my wife.