Rat Menace

A scary experience.

- Samir Ranjan Majumdar

When I was three years old, my mother started teaching me the English alphabet i.e. A for apple, B for boy….R for rat….and so on. I used to ask my Mom, “Why R for rat, why not R for rose?” My mother used to say that a rat was a great disciple of Lord Ganesha.

Years rolled by. I reached adolescence.

One day, when I requested my school class teacher to tell me the difference between rat and mouse, he frowned upon me and retorted saying, “What a silly question!” Finding my eyes still searching for the answer to the question, he said scornfully, “Rat and mouse look alike and it is difficult to make out a difference between the two. It is better you pay attention to your syllabus and stop asking nonsensical questions.” However, my quest for the answer lingered on.

After two years, my maternal uncle came to visit us. It is he who told me that “rats are widely recognised the world over as carriers of diseases. They transmit a number of diseases either directly through bites or indirectly through the bites of parasites found on rats or by the contamination of food with urine or faeces.” He further enlightened me that the most historically dangerous rat-borne disease was the bubonic plague, also called ‘Black Plague’, and its variants. The Black Death, the most devastating pandemic in human history, occurred in 1346-53 killing up to 200 million people in Europe. I shuddered on learning the horrifying facts about rats. From that day I developed a fear psychosis about rats.

“Chinese culture regards rats benevolently – they are the first sign in the Chinese Zodiac, whereas Western Europeans thought of them as “the devil’s lapdog” and “creatures of darkness, death and disease”, he told me further.