Dizzy Miss Lizzy

 

As a child I loved lizards and thought they were exquisite and even cute. I thought they came home to play with me and so I wanted to hold them and play with them. You can read more about that here. As time went by and I grew older  and then one day, I noticed a lizard try to harm a baby lizard and since then I have been a little wary of them. I am now going to proceed to say something that is inappropriate and I fully understand that body shaming is wrong but I don’t know if you have noticed this, lizards in regions that are exceptionally hot tend to be fatter than lizards from regions with neutral weather/temperature for most part of the year. Yes? No? Okay! When I first visited Delhi it was in the early 90s during winter and I thought the city was beautiful and had a lovely time because the child me wasn’t traumatised by the length and breadth of a lizard. When I was a child, I was tiny but I’m not so small now but thanks to the quarantine I have increased in breadth and in-spite of the size difference I am terrified of lizards. When I visited Chennai for the first time, I witnessed lizards crawling towards each other on the ceiling and forming a huge group and then fighting and then falling onto the floor with a thud. This would happen if you were standing at any shop or under any ceiling with a light on for over a minute. The thought of grey, scaly lizards falling to the ground still make me shudder. After visits to Chennai I would always come back to Mysore and greet the lizard at home, in my room with praise and say things like, “Your claws have amazing vacuum, it is always a pleasure to see you on the ceiling at a safe distance from where I am sleeping. You go Glen Gecko!”

I travelled to Delhi again in September, 2009 as an adult and boy was I shocked to see the lizards! They were humongous. They were practically rodents disguised as reptiles. At that point in my life I was just glad that I wasn’t a resident of the Capital. Also, before I forget, did you know lizards tend to paralyse in fear? I discovered this one day, when I was waiting for my dad to come home from work. Back then, the house we lived in had a basement. When my dad came home late, he would lock the gate, park the car in the garage, lock the garage from the inside and then I’d open the grill gate and let him in. (Opening the front door was a hassle because we’d have to first open the door to the foyer and then the main door and I wasn’t allowed to open the grill gate until my dad was standing right in front of it.) On most days I would get by with this ritual without incident. On one day though my dad was taking his own sweet time checking to see if anything required oiling(Our cycles and his bike were inspected.) etc… bored I started running my fingers on the gate which had mesh. As I ran my fingers down the gate, I felt something really soft. I was zonked out, my brain couldn’t process the anomaly of something soft being present on the gate and I kept caressing it until my brain put two and two together and I realised I was petting a lizard and it looked like it had died because of my heavy petting but then I let out a loud shriek as I saw its eyeballs twitch before it dropped its tail and went back to pretending to be dead.

When I first moved up north, it was winter and I hadn’t seen a single lizard and then before we knew it, summer sun was shining on us. One fine evening while having dinner, I spotted a lizard behind “my” chair and I refused to sit there. This lizard was as long as my palm, about 6-7 inches in length (tail included) and more than an inch in width. I was sitting on the sofa opposite the chair and you will not believe me but this did happen, the lizard came charging towards me and I dropped my plate, ran and stood on the bed in my study petrified. I have had death threats during cases but even those didn’t terrify me like the lizards.

Coming back to the present, I am a nonviolent person. Animals, birds, insects, humans all know that. Which is why when I threaten them with physical violence, there’s no reaction. We currently have 3 lizards in the house. When I spot a lizard I say, “Ai/Oi” and they look back at me but if Marley says, “Ai/Oi” they scamper.

I may dislike them but I do respect life way too much to kill them or harm them. Our domestic help knows of my aversion towards lizards and she told me very smugly, “The lizards in your house are so fat and poop everywhere.” I found myself responding back to her with, “Everybody poops, you poop, I poop. The lizards leave one tiny bit of poopoo and you are complaining? It’s not like there are multiple poopoos, just the occasional one. Don’t talk like that about my lizards!” I don’t know how and when they became my lizards, they are now my lizards, kind of like Danyerys and her reptiles, don’t you think? 😎

Can you spot the lizard? 

P.S: I typed this out last night and when our domestic help came home this morning, I knew something had happened. She was excited, but she did something silly, got a bombing from me and even that didn’t dampen her excitement and she told me, “When I was leaving Mr. K’s house I saw a long snake slithering up the stairs, I screamed so loudly and called out for help but the snake escaped! Give me some water, I was terrified.” I told her, “Lizards are also reptiles, you offended the reptiles yesterday when you mentioned about their physiological functioning and that’s why the snake came to warn you.” *Sly grin*

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