How to Kill a Rat
Chronicles of a postmodern Pied Piper
“Rats are the lowliest and most despised of all creatures, my love. If they have a purpose, so do we.” — Suicide Squad (2021)
Well, if I have a purpose, it is to kill rats. One by one, so that none exist by the end of twenty-twenty-one.
No other species has caused comparable pain. Rats crap all over the house. They drill through furniture so that they can crap inside it. If the unfortunate piece of furniture happens to be a wardrobe, they eat the clothes. So that they can crap somewhere else. If you collect your food waste in a bag, they’ll rip it open, sample 30 grams of the garbage and spread the remaining across the floor. That’s all they can eat in a day despite their best aspirations. Rats run the length of your house on the ceiling, providing a thumping background score to your worst nightmares. If you let them fester, they’ll repay you by nibbling away at your toes on the one night you fall asleep without a nightmare. Rodents cause rat fever, carry the Bubonic plague and collapse civilizations.
*
My earliest memory of these vermin is from when I was four. At the time, we lived in a rented house next to a pond. Well, that’s how you would look at it if you’re all about the positive vibes. You could also, in a more realistic sense, think of it as a collection point for the town’s sewers. (The per month rent for the house was Rs. 2000. The landlady owned half the houses down that road and charged this uniform rate from all the tenants. We called her the Rendaayiram Manusi — “Two Thousand Lady”).
Not that rats need a delicate environment to survive. I mean, they aren’t extinct despite our best efforts. Including running horrific experiments on them for more than 500 years. Yet, through the ages, sewers have proved particularly fertile ground for this deadly subgroup of mammals. It is then no surprise that a dozen rats — the black-skinned, short-tailed, fat, sewer-dwelling type — visited us daily. Aside from annual flooding in December, this was another perk you could count on if you were a resident of Mannar island’s lowest of low-lying parts.
On a sweaty afternoon, out of nowhere, a shrill scream reached the heavens from the parents’ room. Through the door crack, I could see my stepmother jumping up and down on the bed — fists clenched, hands raised. My father manically circled her with a metallic rod in his hand. For the outsider, the scene would have registered as an extreme case of domestic violence. My otherwise Gandhian father was only rat hunting, however.
*
Most people in Mannar, indeed in much of South Asia, could never pronounce my name right. The “Eli” in Elijah was often pronounced to rhyme with the “ele” in “elephant”. As though being called “ele-jaah” (/ɛlɪdʒɑː/) wasn’t annoying enough, “ele” — எலி (එලි) — means mouse in Tamil. Thus, my first name was the object of rat calling and ridicule. Come to think of it, the family name didn’t fare much better. “Hoole the fool fell in a pool.”
*
Teenagers in the church that my father pastored in Mannar had a weekly assignment. Every Sunday, they swept the church hall, arranged the chairs, and set up the stereo sound system that sounded monotone. All according to a roster, not the inspiration of the divine. This was a mostly tedious chore. Yet, on those lucky Sundays, a fellow female teenager may be assigned alongside you. And you could either sweep the floor or sweep the female specimen off her feet.
On that mid-August Sunday when the responsibility fell upon me, no member from the opposite sex was on duty. It was just me, a guy that I despised, and Prathaban uncle that day. The latter was a sage like character with a bushy beard and no hair who lent himself to such labour, God willing or not.
The church building, which stood in the middle of a salt flat, was made up of three separate structures. Owing to the congregation’s light collection purse, these were erected in an ad-hoc manner at ten-year intervals. Although raised by different workmen, they all had the same designer. The designer was, of course, my father whose singular design object was to minimise spending. He was a skilled electrical engineer turned clergyman who designed cheap civil structures and killed rodents on the side.
The concrete trinity shared the South Indian open verandah architectural philosophy. Pillars, roofing, and half-raised walls. That’s it. The absence of sealing windows and doors was great for ventilation. But there was one problem. Swift seasonal winds blow across the Mannar island all through the year. Except for the lull in the months of March and April, the building collected plenty of dust. As such, the Sunday cleaning was a rough affair. The routine involved sweeping the floor, scrubbing the chairs, and arranging them into neat rows of eight.
The chairs were usually kept in the small dingy vestry to the right of the main structure. As I wet wiped the last chair, I heard a squeak from underneath the closet that lined the wall. Besides housing the hymnals and bibles, the pink-painted cupboard also fostered Black Death. I immediately rushed out, screaming for help. Prathaban uncle signaled that he’d deal with the devil in rodent skin. Upon sauntering inside the room, he slammed the door shut. A mini-skirmish ensued. Sensing imminent death, the rat screeched as it took refuge under different drawers. Then Prathaban uncle emerged, lo and behold, holding the wiggling wretch by the tail with his bare hand. As I watched in utter horror, he slammed the rat on the cement floor thrice and checked its pulse. Once convinced of its death, he looked up and smiled through his overgrown beard. “Easy.”
*
When I was five, my family moved into my stepmother’s home. The kitchen had a brick furnace and a chimney. The furnace was built on an elevated concrete plate. The space underneath was used for storing firewood. Rats loved to chill out at this spot, especially in the mornings.
My chronic asthma woke me up quite early in the morning. I would lie still in bed waiting for the rest of the world to rise. That day, my father was also up, earlier than usual. I heard his footfalls in the kitchen before they approached my room, from the backend of the house.
“Elijah, you must be up.”
I guessed what was up. He must have heard a rodent in the firewood storage and it was time for a killing.
This wasn’t the first time I had been called upon to assist in the killing of a crapping rat before I had crapped. We had lived in the house for more than five years. Catch them early, catch them young was a calling my father faithfully pursued not only in ministry. I pulled myself out of the bed which I had ceded to — not shared with — my brother. At the time of rising, he occupied 90 percent of the mattress. Even as my elder siblings snored in slumber, I stumbled into my rubber slippers. Ah, this is what it meant to embrace dad given responsibility.
My father and I knew our tag team routine quite well at this point. The kitchen connected to a corridor. I tiptoed past the kitchen door and manned the corridor exit to the back lawn. My weapon of choice was a wooden bar, the one used to secure the backdoor of the house. My father launched himself into the kitchen, kicked and yanked the logs. The scared rat ran to the corridor and out. As it exited, I struck the rodent with the heavy bar. “Thud!”
Two more strikes, channeling all my pent up anger against my elder siblings. The scurrying brown rat pulped red and lay motionless. Neither me nor my father belonged to the kumbaya crowd. We couldn’t perceive the shared animality between us and the dead rat, no matter how hard we looked. As we dug up the garden and laid the pest to eternal rest, neither of us said a prayer.
*
I was amused to learn that a distant cousin, living in a distant land, rears a hamster as a pet. She wasn’t pleased when I joked that if we correctly sequenced rodent DNA it would read “kill me now”. Well, she also has a cat. Hopefully, things work out.
*
In the past two years, in my Mount Lavinia house, I have waged a forever-war against rodents. While my holy war certainly cost less than America’s war on terror, it did not lack in ferocity, hostility or casualty.
The army of vermin that besieged the house consisted of all three of the most common rodent species. These are the Brown rat (Rattus norvegicus, aka Common or Brown rat), the Ship rat (Rattus rattus, aka the Black rat) and the House mouse (Mus domesticus). In other words, this was the axis of evil — sort of an inter-ethnic alliance of rodents against mankind.
In a property evaluation, this house is a straightforward write-off. Built in the mid-70s, every element of the building is coming apart. Every year is a leak year. Roofing, plumbing and installation leak rainwater, Board water and electric current, in that order. The septic tank clogs and the garden breeds poison weed. My aunt who owns the house has been away from Sri Lanka for decades. Unruly tenants have only precipitated the rot in the interim.
When I moved into the house in June 2019, the place looked like someone had cast a strong dilapidating spell on it. Mr. Nimal, the neighbour tasked with caretaking, is a true Theravada Buddhist. Happy to set his dogs on strangers, he embraces other living creatures with open arms. Alongside rodents, colonies of ants, cockroaches, and ticks multiplied in the hood.
My initial response to the situation was akin to the Sri Lankan government’s Covid-19 strategy. I pretended there was no situation. It wasn’t long before the Delta wave swamped my life.
In the still of the night, rats scampering across the roof was all you could hear. When the wretches got hungry, they would descend on the kitchen via the many openings in the ceiling. To be fair though, there’s more opening than ceiling. Like kindergarten kids whose bladders fill up at the exact nanosecond, each day hunger struck the resident rodents at once. Around 2300, they arrived in the dozens and pissed underneath the gas burner, behind the sink, and inside the pressure cooker.
Outside, a global pandemic was raging. Stuck at home, I was depressed and suppressed. I was in a poorly paid job (Startup founderus, aka entrepreneur). The business wasn’t doing well and my only company at home were alcohol and rodents. There were days when I woke up, put out rodent traps around the house, poured myself a few shots of cheap arrack and went back to sleep again. But the rats were easily winning the war. Belatedly spending Rs. 40,000 on an unpleasant carpenter failed to plug the cracks. I almost cried when I discovered a mouse hiding behind the sink the very night the carpenter had done the job.
*
At the height of my great depression, around August last year, I called a long-lost lawyer friend to seek advice on applying for a global scholarship she had won a few years back. Ms. Swasthika Arulingam (Attorney-at-Law) is known for many great deeds, but pest control isn’t one of them. So I am not sure why the conversation diverted to precisely that topic. I wasn’t talking about much else at the time, I guess. After listening to my 101 ways to kill a rodent lecture, she told me that there’s a way out of the woods. By that point, I was willing to pay for any rat quack, but Ms. Arulingam was offering advice pro bono. I was all ears.
“Elijah,” she said, “get yourself a cage trap.”
“And put poison inside right?”
“No, keep a piece of cake. If a rat gets trapped, let it eat the cake first. When done, release it on the beach. That’s what we do at home.”
I was convinced that a half of the rats shitting on me at the time were ones she had set free.
*
On the rare occasion that I gained the upper hand against the menace, I wasn’t around to savour the victory. After putting out rat poison, I left to Jaffna. With no one to PickMe Flash her stuff at will, my elder sister was forced to visit the Mount Lavinia house to retrieve her goods. Upon arrival, she headed straight to the kitchen to cleanse her hands only to discover a half dead black rat sipping the last droplets of water off the sink. I had to call Mr. Nimal to clear the sink.
*
By the time my elder brother Moses moved in with me briefly in the early part of this year, I had virtually given up on fighting the rats. Taking a leaf out of my days as a peace activist, I had settled for coexistence with evil. If the rodents were the Taliban, I was Joe Biden.
The house has two bedrooms but only one bed. I wasn’t about the cede my bed to my brother again, so I asked my brother kindly to take the floor. After the comforts of America, trying to sleep while rats ran around his pillow head wasn’t fun. His arrival thus breathed fresh impetus into the war on horror.
We hired pest controllers who installed poison stations around the periphery of the house. Sticky pads were placed at strategic locations inside the building. The idea was to overwhelm the rodents with fire power, a cluster bombing exercise. We started retrieving half a dozen dead bodies daily, from various parts of the house. Not all recoveries were instant, however. Most times, the dead rats decomposed for a good few days before we got to them.
*
Cluster bombing worked albeit only in bouts. The rodents always returned after a couple of weeks. But then, suddenly, they stopped coming. While we still heard noises in the ceiling, it was an altogether different sound. Neither of us paid close attention to the acoustics. We were just glad that the plague was over.
The 17th of June was like any other day in lockdown. For lunch, we had packed ourselves with carbs and topped it off with orange muffins from the Baguette, Mount Lavinia branch. I was in my room located right at the backend of the house. A short 6-meter corridor connected my room to the hall where my brother was slouched over his laptop. I was struggling over a piece of dumb code I had written when I heard a slithering sound in the corridor. A 6-feet garandiya (Ptyas mucosa, aka rat snake) was fast approaching me. I shot to my feet and pounded the floor. “Mosé, paambu!”. My foghorn voice must have startled the reptile. It took a right turn and slipped inside the bathroom. Grabbing this small window of opportunity, I locked my room door. Moses followed suit as he secured the living room.
Now these two doors are at either ends of the connecting corridor. My room’s door though is short for its frame — i.e. there’s a sizeable gap between the door’s bottom edge and the floor. To my shock, after taking a leak in the loo, the garandiya began crawling through that crack. Willing my best Spiderman instincts, I scaled the bedroom wall — 10 feet tall and what not. I stayed there, praying. After surveying the room for a minute or two, she slithered out the window.
After recovering from the adrenaline rush, I called Mr. Nimal to warn of the snake. Pulse rate down, saturation levels up, it was time for social service.
“Ah yes, putha. The garandiya has been around for a month. My wife got a scare when she found it in our kitchen a few days back. Garandiyas are nice. Just watch out for the cobra.”
