Home sweet home - Our home is full of sweets, some bought by me and the rest gifted to me by good samaritans, friends and relatives. My blood sweetened by all these "Mitha" attracts mosquitoes who apparently love sucking it using their straw like tentacles. Covid is not the only disease which created havoc here. Come rainy season in late summer, Dengue fever caused by mosquito bites is always lurking in ever corner.
In many profession you can afford to be 99.99% accurate, leaving 0.01% scope for error due to various unpreventable factors and attributes. But you must be 100% accurate in the mission of mosquito eradication in your room if you want a sound sleep. No scope for error, failure is simply not an option.
There are drains around our locality but these drains frequently get chocked. The water from the never ending construction works spills over the street creating stinky, dirty cesspools serving as a great breeding ground for the mosquitoes and source of sundry diseases like the dreaded Malaria and Dengue. Once rains create puddles of stagnant water the hitherto dormant mosquitoes rise from ashes like Sphinx announcing their arrival by murmuring around the back of earlobes. These bloodsucking parasites are particularly active during the early morning and twilight hours when one often spends slapping oneself to get rid of them. Akin to unwelcomed guests, one has to intermittently bear them.
There is a canal close to our house which used to be filled with flowing water. I have seen Otters (called Pani Odha in Odia) inhabitating the canal during my childhood, chasing fishes to complete nature's food chain. Long dead and now covered with cess this canal lies dormant and has become the world's biggest mosquito hatchery. At twilight I have seen swarms of them spiraling out of the canal like mini tornadoes, spreading through neighborhood resembling Dracula baying for blood.
Mosquitoes are highly resilient creatures. If they can survive the winters of Alaska and Minnesota, insecticides like DDT etc, they can survive anything. I took a valiant attempt at cleansing my room of these obnoxious blood suckers. I burnt an entire stick of KACHHUA (Tortoise) brand repellent to smoke the mosquitoes out of their hideouts at every nook and corners of my room. Whanever I came across some of them, I mercilessly clapped them to death in my own hands. Then I put an "ALL OUT", another brand mosquito repellent, confident that I had vanquished all of them.
Or so I thought. No.sooner I felt asleep, than came the annoying humming sound buzzing around my ear. I followed with the reflex action of trying to squash it, using one and occasionally both hands. It was followed a phase of tranquility which gave me a false notion that I managed to kill it. But it proved to be elusive again as the mosquito came back with more ferocity like a wounded tiger. The solitary mosquito continued his guerrilla warfare against me leaving me thoroughly battle fatigued.
At that point I wished I could raise a white flag, letting it suck a stomach full of my blood and just leave me alone to continue my slumber. We heard from our legendary epic Mahabharat, when Duryodhan ordered the killing of all brothers of his maternal uncle, the famous Shakuni, all of them died saving Shakuni so that the wily survivor can take the revenge on another day on the egotistical Duryodhan. Similarly it was payback time for the mosquito at my home. The surviving one got its revenge back managing to harass me all night long to the solace of the restless souls of its siblings whom I earlier either mercilessly killed or banished. Like SHAKUNI the mosquito had the last laugh.
Those who live in high rise apartments are lucky, as mosquitoes are not known to fly above 50 feet. In 1970s and 1980s Bhubaneswar, mosquitoes were hardly a menace. We used to make fun of our friends from Cuttack as that city was infamous for its KATAKI MASA (mosquitoes from Cuttack), who are rumored to lift away people for miles. It's now payback time for them to poke fun at us. Now Bhubaneswar can give the other twin a run for money or might even beat them as far as mosquito menace goes. The old fashioned mosquito net works just fine for me. Though not a big fan of sleeping inside it, it's far preferred to a bug bitten, interrupted sleep. More later..
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