A RATling Experience

Life is always known for its unexpected twists and turns and any change, whether in personal or professional space, is bound to come with its challenges. But I was always a veteran and thought I could tackle such changes easily, having shifted my house 22 times in a span of 43 years; yet, what I encountered recently left me RATtled.

I was quite excited with shifting to the 8^th floor and lent hand to my colleague,s who were either busy or less experienced, in tackling this daunting task. The first thing we noticed was the change of view, the calming sea spread out in the distance and a new place - all to ourselves. Well but that was not to be; while we were almost looking forward to visitors, in the form of our 3^rd floor colleagues and students, we were taken aback by a totally unexpected visitor – a RAT!

It wasn’t as if we hadn’t noticed the two holes that lined the outer wall of our office and we had even made efforts to tell the Maintenance about them, but well, they too were busy trying to ‘manage change’, so as days turned to weeks and weeks to months, we let it pass by.

Often visitors are noticed by their presence and their unwillingness to leave, harassing the hell out of the people they visit, but here we were, in a predicament, unique to ourselves. Our visitor was noticed by his/her absence (see I can’t even identify the gender, so unseen was s/he), underlined by the traces, s/he left for us.

In the beginning, it was crumbs, then large chunks of food, then upturned dustbins and finally the place being littered with s**t and p** (you see s/he wasn’t toilet trained)

At first, like with guests, we were tolerant; armed with sanitizers (a cleaning boon for the modern citizen), we cleaned out our workstations, after the housekeeping had swept out the remains (of all sorts) of the previous day.

Then the problem grew worse and so did our desperation. Our actions were now supplemented with phone calls, which were greeted with affirmations without action... (so typical of an Indian setup) and then by emails that brought authorities rushing up to our rescue.

The holes, after a quarter year of sustained, relentless and untiring efforts, were finally plugged. But you see, they were closed only partially and our guest had, by then, learnt the intricacies of the layout. S/he had become more familiar with it than us (after all s/he was equipped with the age old wisdom, ‘when the cat is away the mice are at play’ – the only change being there were many cats (many of us) and it was a mouse – only one.  

We thus had become strangers to peace, the proverbial hunters, equipped with varied degrees that specialised in management (except, of course, on how to manage rats)

Finally, our murderous instincts took over and we decided to poison our guest – for that seemed the only way.

Yet, much to our surprise and awe that soon turned to chagrin, our guest had digested the rat poison, we had set out for him//her and, as a vengeance, left a mark on each table. We beat a hasty retreat. And so the battle continued - human beings (man) against nature or the modern battle of space and we hoped that all management, we had ever learnt and taught, would help us to tackle this issue.

Ganpatis had come and gone along with their vehicles - the mooshik (rat), but our friend continued to be our guest. Currently the battle seems to have swung in our favour, for s/he has not been seen or heard (of) recently. We hope that unlike the Atithi in ‘Atithi Tum kab Jaogey’, we are not forced to make him/her a part of our life...