The wicked cricket

It was 2 am, and I just managed to drift into sleep after counting a thousand sheep when my wife shook me awake and whispered, “There is a cricket in the kitchen. Can’t you hear it chirping? It is driving me crazy. Remember what you did last summer and do it now.”

You can catch a mouse or even a snake, but to locate a cricket in the house, and that too in the kitchen, is not an easy job. Our kitchen has a hundred crevices—thanks to the substandard wooden material used by the builder for making our kitchen cupboards—for the intruder insect to squeeze itself into.

I still remember the ordeal I underwent last year to apprehend two rival crickets who took over our house along with their harem of as many as a dozen female members of their species. It took me weeks before I managed to get rid of them. I even brought a lizard into our flat to help me in the operation Cricket-Wicked, which our security guard brought on payment of Rs 100. I have to mention here with profound sadness that this lizard committed suicide by jumping into the sambar pot, unable to bear the tension the elusive cricket family gave him.

During our first encounter last year with this uninvited vocalist-guest, I consulted Google and learned many things about cricket. Google says only male crickets chirp by rubbing their wings together to attract females and ward off other males. When I read about the rate at which crickets multiply, I just shuddered—ten females can bring 1,000 babies into the world in ten days. If this game of cricket is allowed to be played in our kitchen even for a week, we will end up in a mental asylum.

While I magnified the negative aspects of cricket, my son, who loves all God’s creations, came to me with positive information about the ‘small innocent being’. “You can keep cricket as your pet. They bring good luck to the family. Let it stay. Its chirp does not disturb us much. Does it?” he read out from his computer screen, to my utter dismay. Is it not too much to think of keeping a bug as a pet? Only in the West are all kinds of weird beings petted. Here in our nation, pet means cats, dogs, and birds like parrots.

“There is a human in every animal, just as there is an animal in every human. It is for us to bring about the human in even a small insect like a cricket,” argued my son. While I budged a bit and started seeing his point, my wife was firm.

“I don’t care what you do. I cannot sleep with crickets chirping around me. It is like sleeping in a jungle. You have to drive them out.” I conducted a week-long search crawling under the kitchen platform, peering into cracks and crevices with the help of a torch. The problem is that these wily creatures are expert ventriloquists. If they are in one place, their chirping will appear to come from an entirely different location. Last year I did it, but this year I am older and my limbs are stiffer. This cricket season, I will most likely lose the match.