Foreign Food

I had an unwelcome guest in my bedroom last night. In my pyjama bottoms, to be exact. I was lying awake on my bed, my sleep hindered by the heat and the two-hour nap I'd taken that afternoon, when I felt a tickle just below the elastic of my pyjama trousers. I ignored it as first, thinking it was just the effect of the fan I was lying below, until a horrible creeping sensation forced me to find out what it was. I felt throught the cotton of my trousers a hard, shelled lump, which I promptly removed and threw onto the floor. I turned on the light and met a baby cockroach somewhat worse for wear for having been thrown on the floor. A cockroach! All be it a baby one, I was still disturbed at the thought of where it could have crept to if I'd not removed it.

It's not the first time I've been cheek-to-cheek with an intruder: some weeks back I found an almost drowned mouse in the toilet bowl at Durag Niwas. It looked like it had been there for weeks, poor thing. That was the same day that my head received a good luck treatment from a pigeon.

I've also been having some problems with ants while I've been in India. I've not seen any snakes, nor any big spiders , but thousands of ants: little red-brown ones, huge shiny black ones and small, black, carniverous ones with sharp teeth that have claimed their rights to my bedroom. Innumerable times have I watched a piece of food dropped to the floor be cut up into pieces and carried away by a team of skilled ants in minutes. They seem to like the taste of me, too, as I discovered one morning that I had been bitten some 104 times during the night by the little red buggars. They've also devoured some dirty clothes I had laid on the floor one night. It was another morning shocker - the cloth had been reduced to a pile of cotton powder covered in a swarm of black ants.

An incident with a hungry caterpillar had taught me not to leave food in my room, but I thought that a packet of cashew nuts tighly sealed (with a hairclip) would survive the day while I was at work. Not the case. A colony of red ants enjoyed an organic treat that day.