As though I need more reminding of that fact, the events that followed on a certain seemingly-innocent day lead me to more close encounters with the wild kind than even as ecologically-inclined a person like me would've liked to experience. On the wee hours of the morning, my deep, scarily-comatose-like (for my roommates that is) and peaceful sleep was disturbed very much violently with screams emanating from my resident wing. As I grudgingly gave up to the inevitable and somnambulated to the source of the acoustic disturbance, I entered the left wing bathroom on auto pilot.
And found myself face to face with a ten foot long cobra.
Coiled in the bathroom.
Needless to say even the minutest traces of sleep vanished within two shakes.
As I stood there shock still, with my legs stuck to the bathroom floor with some mysteriously invisible but extremely strong cement (whose properties on discovery is sure to benefit the entire civil engineering community) with my confused brain still taking its time to warm up, the reptilian calmly and steadily slithered one inch past my still-very-much-stuck-to-the-tiles foot in nonchalant disregard.
As I ambled back to my room, my heart still beating off my chest I realized the entire left wing was empty and something along the veins of "snake, snake!" were emanating from the central block. Trying to salvage what was left of my cardiac muscles, and to soothe my ear drums which were still being blown to smithereens from the loud tattoo of a heart that refused to calm down, I hurriedly ran to my room, leaving the snake to enjoy its lavatory visit, locked the door and lay down on my bed staring at the ceiling.
Only to have a lizard the size of a baby Gila monster fall flat on my stomach.
Only to have me wiggle and perform more oscillations of all the limbs I possessed faster than a 50,000 rpm centrifugal machine.
Only for the lizard and myself to get tangled in the mess that was my bed sheet, my pillow cover, papers, books, a dupatta, a pair of jeans, a laptop and all its wires and a veena that were inevitably a part of my bed.
Only to find myself at last, on the floor face to face with the lizard, nay the Gila monster on the bed, looking at me with unmistakable venom on its face.
Only for me to finally realize why.
The tail of the reptilian, which looked more like a severed tree branch was wiggling away on my lap.
Fighting rising bile, I ran out of the room and into the central block.
Where of course, a giant cricket was just eagerly awaiting my appearance.
Now when I say giant, I mean flared-nostrils-of-an-angry-gorilla giant. At the risk of sounding extremely melodramatic, the cricket (and I lie not) decided that my head was to be its landing area. Now anyone who has seen what I look like the first thing in the morning would understand why this was such a bad thing. I'm the sort of a person who has a bad hair day, every single day without fail. Literally that is. Ten hours of sleep had nicely left me with the wildest and most bush-like of all my waking-up-moment hairs yet and the cricket I must say, had a very bad timing.
As it fluttered around helplessly in the quagmire that was my hair, my vocal chords came to a life of their own and started emanating extremely cacophonic bellows which managed to serve as the industrial wake-up siren of the city for the day. My brain which was by now very much overheated, gyrated enough result in severe deficiency of my neck-turning capabilities for the next few days.
It is not known if the cricket had survived its encounter with the wild-bush that is my hair, but since I could find no spare cricket parts on my person, I would like to think it sure did.
My troubles, of course were far from over. Deciding to write off the morning's incidents as a freak of nature, I proceeded to dress up to get ready for class.
It was after sometime that I felt the burning pain shoot down my spine. Any thoughts of "maybe I'm imagining it" flew right out the window the moment the second shot of pain shot through my nerves. Clawing my back, I run to the room to rip off my top to find red welts on my side and back. Very calmly a wasp flies out of the discarded kurti.
Feeling a definite sense of surrealism and brimming with nagging warnings of bad omens, I don another top (after though checking) and proceeded to class.
Scarcely had I sunk into a lull of false security when the bee came in. It was not as though I was wearing anything which looked or smelt anything remotely floral. But the bee just wouldn't leave me alone. Hysterical laughter bubbled out of my throat, promptly making the prof think that I was laughing at him, and naturally leading to my being kicked out of class.
Next came the survey lab period. I don't think I need to elaborate on what happened when I most-innocently stuck a ranging rod right into the heart of an ant hill. That too the Warangal-special-black-with-a-horrendously-painful-bite-ant’s hill. With red welts on my feet to match the ones on my back, I ambled back to the hostel of a decidedly draining day with thoughts of taking solace in the banana chips exported all the way from Kerala at the insistence of my dad.
Of course, this time, I was well prepared for the sight of around fifteen tiny rat babies in the bag from which the chips had long since disappeared.
Not.
They say nature has a funny way of breaking what does not bend. Considering the amount of bodily exercise that involved bending that day, I still do feel pretty much broken.
And it is most certainly NOT funny.
