One of the problems of living in a congested city is the presence of rats. Our Municipality actually has a Department for Catching Rats. One of the criteria for being eligible for this job is to successfully run a 100 yards in 5 minutes. They also have a scheme every now and then ( when the rodent problem becomes acute) when every person who comes with a rat’s tail to the local Municipal Office is rewarded with a princely sum of Rs.5/- per tail.

How to catch a rat

One day, my poor friend Kay found a mouse scampering around her house. Before I could make a witty remark that if she had a  computer in every room, she should expect a mouse inside her house, she explained that it was a genuine rodent who actually came out of his hole and watched her as she ate her grilled cheese sandwich.

For some time now, Kay has had a rodent problem, one which she tackled with a tasty bit of bhajia that she bought from a corner street stall. Her earlier attempts at luring the mouse inside the trap with a bit of stale cheese didn’t work because as the maid said, the cheese was too stale and besides Indian rats like Indian bhajias and not some rancid tid-bit of  Westernised cheese. ( Maids somehow seem to have a solution to every problem). So, thereafter, Kay changed the cheese to bhajias and voila – the rat was in the trip!

After Kay caught the rat with the greasy Indian Bhajia, she thought she had rat catching down to a T.

Alas! that was not the only rat inside the house as she soon found out and she had to lay another trap. But this time round, the rat stubbornly resisted the bhajia and when she actually saw him staring greedily at the grilled cheese sandwich one night, she decided to change the bait and make it grilled sandwich that night.

When the rat doesn’t respond to the bait.

Alas, it didn’t work either so she went down to the Baniya and got some sticky mats the kind that look suspiciously like a slice of bread slathered with strawberry of jam. She placed it near the rat hole ( as per the instructions on the sticky mat) and this morning she found a poor little baby rat dead with exhaustion as he tried to run away from the sticky mat.

On close inspection, Kay realised that the little one didn’t look anything like the big one who had stared down at her sandwich two nights earlier so now she had to put out some more sticky mats for the big one to trample on, each with a different bait.

Would the rat go for the grilled sandwich this time or would the bhajia win?

And yet another question came to mind : was there just one rat or some more down that deep big hole?

Ciao