London: You just utter “lizard”. And the next moment I find that it is enough to make my daughter scurry for cover shrieking chipkali (the Hindi word for the home-grown reptile). She would grab me by my clothes pleading to get rid of what she would say “that ugly lizard” from the walls of our rooms.
“No, no, I cannot put up with that nasty thing. Please do something about the problem”, she would implore stomping her shoes like a kindergarten girl. And that persistent demand makes me wonder about how to get over this lizard menace which is an annual phenomenon. In the following video Mufti Tariq Masood’s Speech about the home lizard. Watch the video.
Chipkali Marna Gunah hai Ya Sawab
There are many of them that swarm the walls hiding behind hanging pictures, photo frames, and whatnot. Towards the end of May/June, tiny lizards of one-and-a-half to two inches in size would crawl all over the place. Their appearance indicates that the rains are around the corner. The wet weather gives birth to kilos of insects, winged and otherwise, who make a good meal for these creatures.
We may detest this mud-colored lizard but nature has created them to consume those flying and other insects a sort of scavenging process. When tiny, they are not as scary as they are when they grow into full-fledged five to six-inch lizards.
I remember a Japanese lady shrieking and rushing out of her room in a hotel in Delhi gasping for breath and pointing toward a lizard on the wall. She later quit the hotel moving to a ‘safer place. I don’t know whether she had another odyssey with the creepy crawly.
Pest control experts:
Pest control experts claim they can totally eliminate them but practical experience disproves the claim. Initially, these lizards, or for that matter, cockroaches and other insects do disappear following pest control treatment, though it poses a big health hazard to the inmates of the house and to the stored food items.
But with the effect of the insecticide waning, they appear again. Seemingly there is no permanent way to get rid of them. The appearance of lizards is a regular feature in all the places in tropical India. Over the years, we have learned to co-exist with them.
I have been watching winged and crawly creatures, moths, flying ants, and other insects appearing from nowhere soon after a spell of rain, mainly below tube lights and electric bulbs. And with them come lizards roaming about with mouthfuls of insects digesting them all so quickly and then going on for more servings.
The hard fact is that I have lived with them right from my childhood. We were never bothered about their presence. They appeared, had their food, and then hid inside their hideouts. They did not disturb or harm us in any way and we did not bother them. That is how we lived under the same roof. via gulfnews
