In memory of my Jerry

I wrote this several months ago. I published this post in my company's internal blog but didn't publish on this space. Here you go! :-)

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There are not many works that demand more effort and will than waking up at 6 o’clock in the morning. More so, if one had imbibed a few bottles of beer the previous night and stayed up till the wee hours of the morning, discussing philosophy and girls with bosom buddies. :-P So it was with a tremendous effort I opened my eyes, and peered at my friend who, it seems, had had a harrowing time trying to shake me out of slumber and was presently hurling some indecent remarks at me. Having retorted with invectives no less indecent, I asked him why the heck did he wake me up.

‘That filthy pest of yours’

‘Eh? What are you blabbering about?’ I asked, puzzled and wondering if he was still under the influence of alcohol.

‘That stinking rat. What else?’

For the uninitiated, among the rich diversity of fauna of my house, which by the way includes my friends,  there was this rat, which I think must have been a scathing critic in it’s previous birth. It frowns upon anything that it believes is an eyesore  or crappy. It expresses it’s disapproval firmly by sinking it’s teeth into the poor object and ripping it apart. The annual gift bean bag suffered a cruel fate because it did not think, I guess, maroon was a suitable color for a bean bag and dug holes in ten places.  It is extremely finicky when it comes to books; it leaves P.G.Wodehouse books untouched and uses ‘Kumundham’ and Chetan Bhagat books for relieving himself of unnecessary stuffs accumulated in it’s bowel. ;-) It has an acute distaste for blue colour and nibbles at anything that has a picture of Actor Vijay on it. :-P It generally announces its presence by pushing the kitchen utensils off the shelf, loves “Mortein Rat Killer” and has a flair for games, which invariably involves pinching the fish-food and hiding it in places we can’t reach for. Even though it caused innumerable troubles, I took a fancy to this rat and put my foot down when my friend, who was pretty sore at it for nibbling at his favourite blue underwear, came up with the suggestion of using mouse-traps.

What did it do now?’ I asked, hoping it had not done anything to my new guitar bag.

‘Go see for yourself. It’s your pet, after all,’ he said with a sympathetic look.

I endeavored to rise to my feet but the gravitational force, which seems to have a special liking for inebriated men, didn’t let go of me. After tripping and stumbling a fair number of times like a newly born deer, I finally got on my feet and proceeded to kitchen to find out what wreak this beast of a rat had caused.

And there it was, in a corner of kitchen, unmoving, upturned and dead.

When I was in class eight, I had a cat named ‘Teddy’, which gave birth to ‘Humpty’ and ‘Dumpty’, and Dumpty in turn gave birth to ‘Jack’ and ‘Jill’. And Jill was my favorite. When Jill died I couldn’t give him a proper funeral- it was just thrown away- as I was admonished that it wasn’t sanitary and that has always been one of my regrets in life. But I wasn’t going to add one more to the list of regrets. I decided to give this rat a proper funeral.

Mournfully, I lifted it by the tail and dropped it into a small cardboard box. While I was thinking of some suitable place to bury it, my friends were involved in a discussion as to what caused the downfall of this mighty rat, which had escaped many sophisticated traps and thrived on rat poison. When I proceeded to perform the funeral service, the discussion had reached nowhere near the conclusion. Opinions were divided as to whether it was the rasam I prepared or my stinking socks that finally did the poor jerry in.

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