I begin with some killing.
I
have always had a horror of cockroaches. I remember last year when I came to
visit my mother in Chandigarh she had had poison poured into the drains of the bathroom
before I arrived so they would all be dead, but the deadliest poison takes them
days if not weeks to die. When I arrived they started crawling out of the drain holes from the bathroom, huge ones ,
half the size of my palm, and invaded my room, crawling into my hand bag, into
the rolled up yoga mat, and just about everywhere else. I would estimate a
count of forty humungous ones. I was the proverbial female standing on her bed
and screaming till my mother’s cook came with a broom to beat them to death.
The hardest part to watch this was the ones that gave him chase and escaped to
God knew what location to appear and frighten me all over again.
A
few nights ago I went to the bathroom, intending to return to bed and a
peaceful sleep, but O horror, there was a cockroach right by my pillow. There
was no standing on the bed and shouting out to anyone, it was the middle of the
night. I had to deal with it myself. I picked up the other pillow and threw it
on him and a la Amour (if you have
seen the movie) put all my pressure on it, hoping to smother it to death. I
just stood with my weight on the pillow for a long time, absolutely paralyzed
with fear. What next? What if he wasn’t dead? What if he was dead? How would I
pick him up?
So,
both my hands pressing down on the pillow, I prayed and asked for strength to
deal with this (for me) crisis. I did a lot of self-talk, telling myself it is
only a cockroach, that it is as afraid, if not more, of me than I it. The
prayer helped. I knew I would deal with whatever arose. When I finally relaxed
the pressure, and lifted the pillow, there was nothing there. There! I said, I
only imagined it. But when I shook out the quilt, there it was, on the floor,
and I went at it with my sandal. It gave me quite a chase, but I was as
determined to get it as he was to escape. Finally I gave him some solid whacks with the
sole and then smushed it to a pulp. I knew I had to mop up the operation
myself. I disposed off the squishy mess of pulped wings, legs, antennae and
bloodless insect goop with a tissue and flushed it down the toilet.
I
am certain the feeling is no different from when one kills a human being, for
instance, in defense. Killing is killing though there are degrees of it. Everything one kills is sentient. And I feel
everything communicates with us. We are they. We share the same DNA. As Narby
says, “Molecular biology revealed that the basic mechanisms of life are
identical for all species. The petals of a rose, Francis Crick’s brain, and the
coat of a virus are all built out of proteins made up of exactly the same 20
amino acids. DNA and its duplication mechanisms are the same for all living
creatures. The only thing that changes from one species to another is the order
of the letters.”
I have to admit I had a sense of triumph
and satisfaction as I stood above his remains. Though I still dislike them, I
have no fear of them. I have killed two more since, with the same sense of
challenge and sport.
The
point of this is that sometimes killing becomes necessary (I realize what a
slippery slope this assertion is), and Prayer rallies all ones courage and
energies.
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