BackNo rats were killed in writing this column
Rats are everywhere. Mumbai alone probably has more than Paris, London and New York put together
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I’ve decided to migrate to the Canadian province of Alberta. A good friend lives with his family in Calgary but that’s not why. I want to move from a country which is obsessed with maiming and killing stray dogs to a province which has waged a sharply focused war against rats since the 1950s—and has succeeded in keeping them out. Rats are the real enemy. At least one place in the world knows this.
Please don’t laugh.
Jan Zalasiewicz, a professor of palaeobiology at the University of Leicester in the UK, makes a friendly appearance in a recent book, The Sixth Extinction, in which Elizabeth Kolbert tracks how human beings will be responsible for a mass extinction event that is already under way (the last one was Messrs Dinosaur and Co. 66 million years ago).
Zalasiewicz’s prediction that in the future rats would be as big as cows made a big splash in the UK last year. Kolbert says it is Zalasiewicz’s professional opinion that one day rats will take over the earth and the author quotes some of his more tabloid-friendly lines about Rattus Futurus from a book Zalasiewicz wrote several years ago: “We might include among them—for curiosity’s sake and to keep our options open—a species or two of large naked rodent, living in caves, shaping rocks as primitive tools and wearing the skins of other mammals that they have killed and eaten."
In case you’re wondering, Zalasiewicz is a serious scientist. He’s on the side of the team that believes we have been in a new epoch of geological time for a while now, courtesy the actions of human beings. They are lobbying for it to be officially termed the Anthropocene.
I believe his predictions about rodents growing stronger. Of course this won’t happen in our lifetime—we’re talking a few million years from now—but the rat takeover has already begun. All the world’s big cities battle with rats.
A couple of months ago, Paris said it was going to become the world’s first rat-free city after it featured on an Animal Planet list of the Top 10 Worst Rat Cities in the World. I’ll believe it when it happens. Rats have already taken over the gardens at the Louvre.
India’s contribution to the list was Deshnoke, in Rajasthan, where the rat-loving Karni Mata temple is located. I’m not sure why Mumbai didn’t feature. If Internet estimates are anything to go by, the city with an 88 million rat population is way ahead of Paris, London and New York put together.
“No census has been done on Mumbai’s rats. We have no idea how many rats live here," says Rajan Naringrekar, head of the insecticide department at the Brihanmumbai municipal corporation, over the phone. That title makes him the city’s go-to guy on everything from leptospirosis to dengue. The only number he can confirm is the number of rats the municipality has killed this year. “One lakh, thirty-one thousand till 20 July," he says. Most of these rats are killed in the night by the city’s 40 rat catchers, whose daily target is 30 rats each. But it’s a losing battle.
Rats, as Naringrekar points out, have a gestation period of only 21 days. They produce 8-10 babies at a time. These babies mature sexually within five-six weeks and go forth and procreate. You do the us versus them math while I throw up.
Every Indian who goes for a morning walk begins the day with a rat sighting. And every self-respecting Mumbaikar has their own grisly bandicoot story. For someone who grew up in this city, my musophobia (even squirrels are rats with tails) might sound weak-hearted.
I can pinpoint the genesis of this fear. I was brought up in a hotel and once, during an extended labour lockout in the early 1990s, when the only people staying in that six-storey building were my family and a few staff members, the rats got brave and started climbing up from below the ground. Several years later, in Bengaluru, my somewhat dormant fear was revived when the fancy kitchen of our ground-floor rental was suddenly infested with big rats.
They say, face your phobias to conquer them. Trust me, that doesn’t work.
I tried it in 2012, when two-year-old Babyjaan’s first movie ended up being Ratatouille. For nine months, every alternate day or so, I watched a movie about a French rat called Remy who cooks. It always made me ill and I thanked the movie gods when she graduated to Mamma Mia!
Rats are everywhere. In Marvel films where the action, without warning, shifts to the sewer; in pre-school readers since R-A-T is among the easiest words in the world to read; and scurrying busily and brazenly not more than 3ft from us when we walk on any city road (they’re in our jungles and villages too).
In Nilanjana Roy’s The Hundred Names Of Darkness, about a clan of cats who live in Nizamuddin, Delhi, the bad guys are led by Moonch, a belligerent bandicoot who wants to take over the golf course where peacocks, cats, rats, snakes and koels have coexisted peacefully for generations. Her description of the smell of bandicoots made my hair stand: “The smell was as thickly layered as paint; rich, oily, unpleasantly musky, like freshly turned earth where something rotten had been found underneath the clods." Phew.
Writing this column has been an exercise in masochism—and not the kind where you derive pleasure from the pain. My second attempt at conquering my fear has failed miserably. Hunting for rat population data on the Internet was terrifying. I read with my eyes firmly averted from the oversized images accompanying every single piece of information about rats (I even encountered a photo of a rat with an animated tail). But I did find Alberta.
Alberta seems to be the only place in the world which is free of rats. Every municipality has a pest control inspector. There’s a toll-free hotline, 310-RATS (7287), to report any sightings. If a rat is spotted, it makes the news. Rat control is mandatory and it’s unlawful to own a domestic rat or fool around with one in a biology lab.
Immigrating to Alberta might be a truly genius plan—if the future doesn’t go the Mad Max: Fury Road way. The film’s utopian destination, The Green Place, the only remaining spot where it was still possible to cultivate, turned out to be contaminated.
Priya Ramani will share what’s making her feel angsty/agreeable every fortnight. She tweets at @priyaramani and posts on Instagram as babyjaanramani.
Read Priya’s previous Lounge columns here.
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