I’ve never lived in a house like this. It’s big, a bungalow, has three bedrooms, one living room, one kitchen, two bathrooms, and space in the roof where you can host a party, or sun bathe during the winter, or sleep at night during the summer. Well, rooftops are very much a part of Nepali socializing culture.
It amuses me, during the winter, to see how many people spend entire days just sitting on the rooftops, looking at the passersby – and during summer, like now, when it’s so, so, so hot, with temperatures hitting 40 in some places, and humidity at nearly a hundred, they abandon their beds and spend the nights up on the roof. For it’s much cooler there, with the full moon shining down on your, and the breeze making the trees sway –
Crap, I was writing about my house. And I say I’ve never lived in a house like this not because of it’s architecture, or the number of extravagant rooms, but the housemates that I’ve failed to get rid of.
When I’d just come in, the most prominent were spiders. There were all sorts of the creepy fellows around. I counted more than ten different species, and I once got the fright of my life when one as big as my fist, with legs about seven inches long, crawled out from behind a bowl on the table. I was so scared I killed him, yet later I realized he might have been the most harmless fellow. Still, the sight of him reminded me of Tolkien’s stories.
At least the presence of this one that I found in my sink encouraged me to make art with my camera – looks like a scene from a sci-fi film, maybe terminator, and those drops of water, don’t they look like mercury? 🙂
Then there are frogs. Or toads. Or whatever they are. They just don’t leave. Every evening, I find at least two hopping around, inside the house! I’ve given up chasing them out. Maybe they have a breeding ground somewhere in here, in one of the unused rooms, or under the carpets, but I’ve yet failed to see it.
And I wonder what they are doing here, if they can’t eat the tons of cockroaches that seem to be in every stupid nook and cranny! The other day, I sprayed the house, and there was about a hundred dead cockroaches that I swept out. Was to disgusted to take a photo of the massacre, but they made quite a pile outside.
I once found a scorpion on my mosquito net – well, not on the net itself, but inside the house, and it might have been on the net, you know 🙂 And yesterday, I found some kind of bug in the sink, like a squid, or a giant slug, or a giant something that I can’t tell. How did it get there?
There are bats that live above my front door. I’ve tried to chase them away, but they went away for the winter, and returned when it got warmer. Now, in the morning, some birds come to eat their shit.
And there are birds that have made a nest in one of my ventilators. I blocked it with cardboard, so they no longer fly into the house, but before I realized the problem, when I’d just come in, I would find a bird flying about almost everyday. And when they were building their nest, I would find all sorts of rubbish in the kitchen, and I would wonder how it got there!
And there are the ants. They started coming out last week. They invaded, and at least they clean up the dead cockroaches that die of old age and fall in places I can’t find them. So I like the ants, until I find them all over the sugar and rice and my food! Then I get very angry!
This is an eco-house. I should get a Pulitzer prize for housing all these guests, or maybe I should be quarantined for living in such a house has infected me with some kind of diseases that will wipe out mankind :-))
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