Blackberry Delite

I have a couple of extremely quiet housemates who don’t take up much space. Our deal is that I get the floors, they get the walls. They’re homebodies, on top a delicate green with a grayish cast, peach on bottom: Lizards, though I think of them as Rahu and Ketu, asuras who longed for Amrita, the divine nectar, but were tricked by Vishnu, then mutilated as divine payback for their presumptuousness and made half-nagas. For revenge they occasionally eat the sun and moon. My nagas wholly deserve their gluttonous appellations.

Rahu lives in the bedroom, sallies out often and watches me closely. Ketu is more reclusive and stays in the kitchen. My guys aren’t as fleet as their Thai cousins that you watch and watch and they’re utterly still, but avert your eyes for one second and they’re across the room. These two are slower and heavier.

No wonder. They’re pigging out on my vegetables and fruits. I bought a mess of onions, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, Indian hot peppers and a green pepper. That was when I thought I had a refrigerator. My new red one, while beautiful, arrived in an unworking state and had to be carted off in a wooden wagon attached to a bicycle to be repaired. So I kept them in the cool bedroom towards the moment when the refrigerator returned. For several nights, Rahu courteously left them alone. He seemed satisfied with his mosquito diet.

But then I woke to find a neatly dug hole in the remaining tomato. He had spit out the seeds. I was willing to share that much. But every night thereafter he feasted on something else. Same M.O. Each time, I thought, well, ok, but he didn’t touch anything else, so he must not like what else was on offer, and my remaining vegetables will be safe. But he was biding his time. One night he went after a bag of prasad (sweets given at the end of worship) I brought back from a puja and planned to open in the morning to record its contents. There had been part of a coconut in there, which I gave to my rickshaw driver the night before, and nuts, and a kind of white wafer, maybe made of eggwhites. I thought that was it. But there must have been something else, since I found its liquid remains the next morning.

He got more aggressive. He went after one of the potatoes that until then had sat untouched with the onions, making his usual neat hole with his pointed little snout and sharp teeth and digging out the flesh. Finally, he excavated the green pepper. One night I brought home a banana. I really wanted that banana, my only breakfast the next morning, but Rahu had gotten it! I was so hungry I just cut off his half and ate the rest.

The restored refrigerator has finally returned. I have cold water and ice, and an impregnable fortress to thwart the devouring thief Rahu.

But he had one more surprise for me. I brought my out-of-service Blackberry along for its address book of my life. When I took it off the charger this morning, I noticed the four keys at the corners of the keypad had all been gnawed—by Rahu’s sharp little teeth! He did cosmetic damage on three of the keys but shredded the surface of the backspace key which is now a collection of small sharp edges sticking up. Fortunately, it functions, so I just store it face down. This Rahu is a Naxal.


Folks are asking for pictures. I am starting to take them, but still struggling with the transfer. For some reason I haven’t been able to load pictures from the web onto the blog. Bear with me.