Kishore Singh: My family's animals

PEOPLE LIKE US

People go to great lengths to keep away visitors from their homes, but my sister and brother-in-law, who appear quite hospitable on the surface, have obviously worked out a fairly flawless system to ensure that they're not too bothered by unwelcome guests. Either that, or they're simply the kinds that like beastly things.

Take their affinity with snakes, for instance. Since my brother-in-law, a pretty rum chap otherwise, is in the army, one expects him to pop up in some unexpected places that you'd like to toodle down to for a once-over. Trouble is, most of these places "" pretty scenic and all that "" seem infested with snakes.

"Got them running wild," acknowledges his wife with a grave nod, "why, the other day, there was one wrapped around the front door handle." Not the kind of stuff to dish out to the faint-hearted. "Er, do they have a hibernation season?" I ask. "There's one slithery fellow that hibernates all right," chortles my bro-in-law, "in the guest bathroom."

But snakes aren't the only beasties in their armoury. "Got to shake out the shoes every time we put them on," says my little sister. And why might that be? "Scorpions," she hisses, "the place is infested with them." You'd think they were in the middle of a jungle, not in a city, but they seem to get along just fine "" so long as there aren't too many people begging for temporary home and hearth.

When we swung by their cantonment some years ago on a marathon drive through the country, they concealed their dismay well "" we were just overnighters, after all. But you can't be cautious enough: "Rats might nibble at your toes at night," my sister warned, "don't panic." We didn't sleep that night, and good-byes were at an extraordinarily early hour the following morning (having nervously checked our shoes for scorpions and the washroom for snakes).

Mice, monkeys and mosquitoes have all been par for the course. Birds of prey, too. And their list of animals has been growing into a steady menagerie over the years. "There's a stray "" pretty savage too," warns my sister "that's had her litter in the house," adding for no understandable reason at all, "and she can't stand unknown faces." Thousands of kilometers away, we show no great anxiety to make her acquaintance either.

Termites in her store, rodents in his garden, no wonder where they might find themselves posted year after year, there's no let-up in the zoo they seem to carry with them. Despite their tales of infestations though, they couldn't prevent a gathering of the greater clan that opted for their house as the passage-way to another city on an occasion that was infused with sadness. And my brother-in-law, unused to such comings and goings of relatives who he might only have heard of from my sister, soon took to bed with fever. The children succumbed next to bouts of viral, the maid got it too, and so did my sister herself. (What delicious irony that with scorpions and snakes to choose from, they should succumb tamely to some invisible virus or bacteria.)

But even so, they put on quite a show. Since creatures that go slithering in the dark don't pop up on request, my sister and brother-in-law decided to invite home the easiest of them all. Little ants raided their living room. Middle ants crawled across the kitchen and up and down the fridge. And great big ants, heaps and heaps of them, busied themselves in the bathrooms, curing you in one fell swoop of such absurd notions as hygiene. The guests might all have fled like the seasonal cold, but you can bet they've got an army of ants living with them right now.