Lizard

With my feet glued, I crawl on the walls of your kitchen. I make my home, your dark attics riddled with old furniture, used cartons of grocery, and torn clothes bundled into a heap by the corner. I spend my mornings ruminating with my sticky forepaws rested before me; through the rubble surrounding the obscure corners, I snivel my way uplifted with the heavy warm air. At nights I step out with trepidation, lest I bugger off the moths that beat their heads against the glowing hundred watt bulbs. Sometimes I wait for the right moment, with the toes of my paws curled, to pounce on the big fly, the size of my mouth; other times I dash off casually into them with the sticky tongue wagging about before me.

Rainy season is a feast; the bulbs and tube lights reeling with senseless moths thrusting their heads into the glass seals. In times of quietude, when I am not out hunting, I let the thought cross my mind - perhaps the moths’ affinity with tungsten is not as innocent as it appears. Scrambled eggs are a fright to me; my own eggs, I lay them back in the attic. Summers are frighteningly competitive; moths are lesser in number and have to be shared between us and cockroaches. My wife is addicted to roaches; she feeds on the baby roaches while I distract the big ones by deceptively dragging them into a futile competition. Out pops a baby roach from the sink hole with its shiny head and two nascent antennae surveying the surroundings; my wife is nimble and lightning fast, she clutches onto the roach and brings it back to the attic.

Then there are times when the owner of the house, a lady in her late twenties with rotund rear, brandishes a raised slipper and slaps the roaches one by one by the kitchen sink. On this particular occasion, I watched with my underbelly clinging to the ceiling. An irresistible feast awaited us; my wife slipped behind the lady of the house who presently kneeled to collect the dead roaches into a plastic slate. Perhaps, the house owner had a quick repugnant eye for the roaches, for her crouched posture allowed her to see the underside of the sink; clinging to the hose were a romantic roach couple mating in the serene dark. With no restraint, the lady dabbled with her broom in the narrow dingy hose walls and priced the romantic couple. My wife, who was closer to the scene than I, was to later poignantly explain that the female roach still had the half bitten rice grain in her mouth when she was thwacked. Later that night over dinner, we wrestled a wee bit to entangle the locked antennae of the roach couple; I swallowed the juicy potbellied female who was carrying at the time; my wife complained that the male roach was coarse and his cloak grainy.

Next evening, there was a power outage; caught by the suddenness of it, a feverish young niece of the rotund rear house owner lit a candle. It brought back memories of my childhood; in the olden days - I am now referring to the times of candle whispers - father and mother jockeyed playfully around the kerosene lamps. In those days, a certain nocturnal bliss overwhelmed us; I waited inside the bamboo stick of the thatched roof all day long for the sun to drown himself in the green fields that besieged the many inclined roofs around us. Then, father tickled my belly ‘wakey wakey’, out we went to the roof; with my arms around father’s neck, I counted the stars till my eyes fatigued and eyelids drooped. When I woke up in the morning, drooling lips stuck to my mother’s breast, father would have already left for the day’s hunt. The insects that we fed on, in those days, were nutrient rich; crickets and cicadas were plentiful in the fields. Once in a week, father priced a grasshopper and we relished the feast with such merriment that our bellies ceased craving for a day or two. Father munched the crispy wings in his mouth and fed me for hours, for I was losing milk teeth at the time. The scalen tail, I yearned for, a mouthful of it and I was the happiest reptile on the planet.

I remember the migration; the truck driver must have been in a bad mood, for the ride was imperiously rickety. We locked ourselves in the bottom drawer of a thickly varnished table; the journey was particularly discomforting for mother, she was carrying at the time. Around us were cement slates with furrowed faces; tumblers full of earthenware dishes; rusted iron grills; cans full of kerosene and a small black and white TV. The varnish was pungent and mother vomited several times during the journey; but we stayed put, for she was carrying, and we could not risk being seen outside. Next two weeks were the most difficult times; the house owner laid open in the sun, everything from an old suitcase to the table. Our drawer was scooped out and thawed in the sun; after a harrowing week of nomadic lifestyle, we eventually settled in the wall crack an inch beneath the cement roof.

Then mother died in an accident; it happened on a day like any other day. We were getting used to the new surroundings, so much so that father reckoned we could indulge in the playful evening ritual of ours. With my arms crossed around father’s neck, we climbed atop the cement ceiling. But the sky was foggy and the stars were like smudges of white ink dabbed on a black polythene film; I was left dispirited and moody; father snuggled into a used mat, sank his tail into it and wagged gently to measure its capacity. Then we heard mother’s weak cry and rushed downstairs to find her whimpering with a burnt back; father licked her badly scaled back for two hours to alleviate the pain before she collapsed. It was the wax candles; mother with her usual calculated gait (that she worked out for a kerosene lamp), approached the dim exterior of the waxen candle to find herself beneath a torrent of accumulated wax that came pelting down on her like an ice shelf on polar caps. That was our first introduction to the modern house.

Following the incident, Father grew weary, circumspect and dreadfully morose. He grumbled and renounced food for days; if it was not for our cousins who were living behind the rows of old newspapers in the cupboard, I would not have survived the disconsolate days. Aunt had three daughters, I fell in love with the second one; she had plump cheeks and a mole on the left hind paw. Father’s demise was not shocking given that he ate nothing at all; I reckon he loved mother wholesomely, heartbroken and devastated, he waited hungrily for the onset of death. In the following year, the house was redecorated and the ceiling coated with stucco. I and my plump cheeked cousin turned wife retreated into the attic where we lived moderately happily until the present day.

Modernity disquiets me; I find that it resonates with pretension. Although the marriage turned out to be an amicable one, I cannot say that it was altogether fruitful. There are times when we licked our wounds of reptilian anger; there are times too, when we embroiled ourselves in deep embraces which only the syncopated sound of the moths beating against the bathroom tiles could have separated. There was this one time when she prayed too close to the rotund rear of the present owner; beneath her broom, clasped between the peelings of banana were the guts of a roach. My wife noticed that the owner was preoccupied in rearranging a dusted shelf and slipped into the broom; on her retreat, she skidded on the banana peel and bore the brunt of house owner’s broom. She lost her tail in the incident; I never left her side for two long days; at the end, we both swallowed the solidified salty crystals of her tears on the pillow of my chest.

Over the years, my wife grew weary; my knees are not as strong anymore. We both realise that our days are nearing. Modernity and migration has cost me my parents; time and again, secluded from my wife in the pretence of hunting, I lock myself in the old discarded drawers of the table, where I had spent time with my dearest parents.