Quit! Incorrigible mosquito

I put on record and declare vociferously that I hate mosquitoes. I can tolerate cockroaches in the kitchen closets, lizards on the wall, earthworms in the bathrooms, ants on the kitchen slab, houseflies and centipedes during monsoons, but not mosquitoes. These harmless creatures, at the most, would elicit an alarm from me or a jump or a shudder. While mosquitoes do not evoke any such reactions, I still despise them from the bottom of my heart.

Gleefully, I read out aloud from a paper that mosquitoes are in no way useful on earth except for being irritant, deadly, poisonous, miasmic, fatal, mephitic, virulent, noxious, and a string of other negative adjectives I could use to empty the cauldron of my distaste for mosquitoes.

I cannot forget an experience which led to the cancellation of my much awaited tour to Varanasi. That fat black big mosquito sat on my ankle and, within no time, grew fatter. My impulse forced me to murder it ruthlessly and the blood spattered. “Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?” I opined with the words of Lady Macbeth replacing the ‘old man’ with the ‘old mosquito’.

The subsequent action was washing my hand vigorously with water to clean the smeared blood of the mosquito. As in the case of Lady Macbeth, the sight of the blood on my palm was obnoxious. I recalled this dialogue from her sleepwalking scene: “Yet, here’s a spot… out, damned spot! Out/ Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the/ Perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little/ Hand… (what’s done cannot be undone!)”
Unlike Lady Macbeth, my obsession was more to do with the sight of the blood rather than its smell of the blood. I cleansed my soul of the cruelty meted out to the mosquito by rendering half an hour extra prayer.

That night was unusual. Rain lashed heavily complemented by thunder and lightning. The murdered mosquito might have been a community leader or a revolutionist. A swarm of mosquitoes invaded the room to attend the funeral, mourning loudly and cursing my body. No mosquito repellants worked that night and I was left in darkness, guilt-stricken and shrouded in mystery.

Afflicted by my crime, I lost confidence and saw that my body temperature had increased. Excruciating pain took over my joints and it was miserable even to change sides. Pain spread in circular motion like ripples of water on a calm river. Moments of peace were lost. Prospero’s curse to Caliban echoed in my ears “For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps, side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins shall, for that vast of night that they may work, all exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinched as thick as honeycomb, each stinging than bees that made them”.

The dawn saw me battered and shattered. With dishevelled hair, dark circles around sleepless eyes, parched tongue, and reddish long-drawn face, my weary, feverish and pulsating body was wheeled to the doctor. He declared that I had polyarthritis fever with a terrible joint pain infected by a virus carried by a ‘mosquito’! Certainly,the vengeful mosquito had won in its mission, posthumously!