Random rodents keep entering our house. We are the only house on the whole street who have a tree and space for the Earth around the tree. We also compost around the tree. And to cap it all off, our dog Perry likes us to keep the door open so she can keep running out and barking at various things. Needless to say, lizards, rats, mice and on one memorable occasion, a squirrel have come in. It's especially bad after harvesting the mangoes- the smell of mangoes in the verandah room is heavenly and serves as a beacon to many many creatures in addition to humans.
I can handle lizards and feel reasonably comfortable guiding them out. I am intensely scared of rats and mice. Once a rat entered our house, climbed the stairs (!) and entered Ani's room upstairs, hung out there all day, emerged in the night and jumped on his bed and bit him on its way elsewhere. We had to go to the emergency room for tetatus shots at 3am. Our househelp Shanthi is very brave and if I have sequestered the rodential intruder in the verandah or the room attached to it, she strides in and pushes them out.
If Perry gets a scent of any of these rodents, she kills them. So, Perry is like a brahmastra- you only bring her in as a last resort and you can expect destruction. Bedroom rat, for example- instant death.
Today I wasn't sure what had entered, but the squeaking sounded like a rat. Durga shut the bedroom door so the rodent couldn't escape. All my clothes cupboard doors had been open and I was dreading going there tomorrow morning to see rat-shit everywhere on my clothes. It was really stressful and I felt very out of control. In fact, while I have managed reasonably well without RK these past few months, this was one of the times I desperately missed him. He would have understood my utter reluctance to enter the room or deal with this problem by myself and would have done something about it (as he has before). He would have made a nice joke, turned it into a learning lesson for the kids.... basically, he would have handled it really well. Unlike me. This is what I did:
I dithered a good bit, messaged some loud messages on Whatsapp to RK and then we let Perry into the room. We could tell that Perry had caught the scent and then on the other side of the door, heard several very loud shrieks and then silence. I gently opened the door and caught sight of a much smaller grey body than I was expecting.
I yelled to the kids (kids are even more scared than I am... I asked Ani to help since he's the man of the house now and had to listen to Durga retorting about patriarchy and Ani informing me that I was the adult here) and then they peeked in and Durga said, I think it's a shrew.
Look at it... it's so cute... it is supposed to feed on insects, worms and spiders. No wonder it was hanging out in my garden. Why, oh why, did it have to come inside the house?
I am swamped with guilt. Also nausea. I wish to God I had done something different.
