I’ve been in a sea-craving blue funk lately. I’m sure it’s ridiculous but there are times when I feel physically claustrophobic because I’m eight hours inland. Anyway all my moaning and bitching will find reprieve over the long weekend when we drive down to Pondicherry. Cheered by the thought, I’m able to appreciate Bangalore for all its other pleasures: the Pomegranate tree in my garden which now has two or three near-ripe fruits on it, the flourish of Anthuriums which seem to have sprung up overnight, squirrels furring up the neighbour’s mango tree.
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Also, the cat has birthed a litter in the tiny space between my garden wall and the neighbour’s house. The kittens are small and downy, coal-black with green eyes like their mother. The wall is high enough to protect them from Dobby, my resident lion, but I can easily pop my head over it when I want to look at them. The worrying thing is that their mother is getting more adventurous in her forays for food. Not only does she saunter through our garden (risking Dobby’s wrath) but the other day, I came into the living room to see a whisk of black tail disappear through the back door. She had been rummaging about in our kitchen.
Dobby’s almost had a stand-off with her on two occasions. So far, she’s been too clever for him.
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And the other day, we had an unexpected visitor.
I have an uneasy relationship with bats. Growing up in Bombay, many mornings I woke up to see one suspended from the ceiling fan above me. That’s never happened to me here. (Do bats prefer 6th-floor seaside apartments to ground-floor flats?) But I’m not quite over the creeps of opening eyes to a winged rodent hanging over my prone body, my mother whispering tensely, ‘Don’t be scared. Move slowly.’
Bat Conservation International has a lot of reassuring information on bats in buildings but I suspect few people would be okay living with bats as tenants. This doesn’t take away from our fascination with the creatures, of course. In fact, the myth-making (Count Dracula, Batman) that surrounds them is quite dependent on our unease and a certain sense of awe.
One of the things I find interesting is that bat wings are structurally very close to the human hand. They even have thumbs, clawed ones. I think this is one of the things that we find least appealing about them — their bony wings as opposed to the fluffy, feathered versions on birds. But this also makes it easier to co-opt them into our myths. I don’t think a superhero with fake bird feathers would work quite as well.