Retribution

There was a dream I used to have, it was set in my bedroom, the big old one in the block of flats, number 11. There were snakes on the floor, and scorpions. Not that I have ever seen one, but I knew what it was. And most of the floor was on fire too; everywhere you could step there was danger.
A was talking about Kukrail the other day, Lucknow’s crocodile park. How could I forget the dreams, the ones with ghariyals, little baby ones, like lizards, but so much more hardy, better survival skills, better teeth. Little ones in glass domes, giant covered petridishes.
Kukrail is famous for two things. This park, and a naala.
In number 11, where our phone number, I remember, was 611378, which later became 2-611378; there were lizards. There are lizards here too, in 3/42, but there is no me, not the same one who used to collect lizards’ eggs and watch them.
There was a little soapdish, the kind you get in fancy hotels (this one was from the Zürich Hilton, as it happens), in which I had some suds solution and would put in eggs and wash them.
There were weevils too, that used to breed in the storeroom. They had a home too, the flat sheet of sponge that I took to them.
We forgot how to live with critters everywhere. Nobody particularly enjoyed it, except me, I think, but we were never as overly bothered by creepy crawlies until now.
Yesterday there were ants. Everywhere. Crawling up your leg, drinking your sharbat, eating your lunch, sharing the bath with you.
I might have had nightmares; I’m pretty sure I would have, had I slept at all. Dreams of my retribution, death by ants, the man eaters that even Livingstone would have feared. Fifty or more carcasses underfoot and a hole full of Flit.
Urban memories have no depth; perhaps if I had lived in Kaladaikurichi or in Gangaikondan like my old Thatha, the ants might have moved me to put some aata out for them to eat. In this house that had begun to cave in many years ago, the ants are a false friend; crowds with no depth, only blackness. No quaint legends here. They can move you, yes; to call pest control.