2009-08-12 - 11:55 p.m.
Dear Rana Dasgupta
As I understand it, you're spending most of your time in India these days. If you don't mind me asking, how are the cockroaches there?
I am now in the midst of the first cockroach season of my entire life. The locals are dumbfounded by this. Surely there are cockroaches in Canada and Aomori, they say, and indeed there surely are. But their numbers are so sparse there as to allow their regular appearance only in the dingiest of hovels.
I was warned about the cockroaches of temperate Japan and took pains to adhere to the advice I received. Still, one otherwise pleasant summer morning, a cockroach scuttled across the top of my stove and I recoiled in sheer, instinctual terror. It was a reflex reaction. I saw my hands waving back and forth in the air as I squealed and leapt away from the stove and my gut contorted itself into an angry little exclamation point which didn't recover its appetite until hours later.
I realized that merely trying to keep the kitchen clean wasn't going to be enough. The level of sanitation required to completely deter temperate zone cockroaches would amount to biweekly bleach scrub-downs of most of the surfaces of this house, a level of cleanliness that I'm not going to attempt to enforce. I decided to try a somewhat different technique. I decided to, to at least some degree, overcome my fear of them.
I bought a can of bug spray and practiced on a couple of spiders. The locals had warned me that many varieties of spray seem to have almost no effect. And so it was that I purchased a semi-expensive brand which made the interesting claim of incorporating a coolant that essentially freezes cockroaches as it poisons them. Now confident in both my tools and my skills, I next endeavored to turn the cockroach into an object of interest rather than one of uncontrolled fear. This took the form of a series of lazy art projects, my favorite of which was the scrawled drawing of a phallus, a plus sign, a roach (of the medicinal variety), an equals sign, and a cockroach. Shuhei traded me a piece of gum for an explanation of why that was funny.
After that, I waited a long time for another cockroach. This opportunity finally arrived as Shuhei was pulling a trayful of cookies out of the oven. "Ahhh! Cockroach!" he yelled while struggling to maintain composure long enough to put the hot tray down somewhere safe.
I leapt up from the couch and grabbed my spray. "Where?"
"Under the fridge."
I got down on my hands and knees to take to a look which was, of course, fairly pointless as the space beneath fridges is almost completely dark. I took a test shot with my spray. The cockroach darted out to the left. I sprayed with sincerity now, long and hard. The cockroach attempted to climb up the wall, fell, landed on its back and wiggled its legs around helplessly.
In honesty, the entire hunt was over and done with so quickly that killing my first cockroach was somehow less than satisfying. My first well-executed kill did not, in my opinion, happen until two days ago.
I was lying on the couch reading and saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. A cockroach scuttled across the living room floor moving in short, fast bursts like a mouse. It paused briefly under a cushion. Its body was hidden and only its head and antenna poked out. It struck me as a grotesque parody of the antics of a more cuddly pet at play.
I got up to get my spray. When I came back, the cockroach was nowhere to be seen. We played hide and seek for a while. Eventually, I found the cockroach hiding behind a tacky rendition (which I love) of the seven lucky gods. "Ha! Not even Ebisu can save you now!" I said to the cockroach as my lethal spray was ejected from its can. The force of the blast pushed the cockroach behind the TV. It lay there on its back wiggling its legs feebly. I sprayed it a little more just for good measure.
At five o'clock that morning I was rudely awoken by an earthquake. This is now, by the Shindo scale, the third lower-level six earthquake that I have experienced. This time again, although lots of things fell, I was lucky in that the only thing that broke was my marimo aquarium. (Still, I really liked my marimo aquarium and feel well-entitled to mourning its loss.)
Shuhei came home from work a couple of hours later by which point I'd already cleaned everything up. He'd somehow managed to cover the thirty minute walk between his job and our house in ten and arrived literally dripping with sweat, which I thought was pretty cute. I can learn to deal with cockroaches, but we both know that I will always need plenty of consoling after an earthquake.
