No heart at all

 

By Shevlin Sebastian

Just a day before my mother returned to Kochi, after five months with her daughter and son, following my dad’s passing away, my wife went to her ground-floor flat to do a clean-up.

In the kitchen, she noticed that in the third drawer of a built-in wooden cabinet, five baby rats were scrambling among the plastic bowls and a couple of rolls of cellophane paper. She pushed the drawer shut.

Later, she told me about it. I wondered what to do. Like my wife, I feel queasy when I see rodents.

I took the help of George, a watchman of a nearby building.

He pulled out the drawer, and we took it to the side of the house.

On the other side, there is a one-acre banana plantation.

“Let’s tip them over,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, and did so.

During the day, the mother rat foraged for food and brought it to the babies at night. It probably chose the drawer because it felt it was a safe place. The house had been empty for so long. Outside, in the grassy land, among the teak and coconut trees, there were numerous frogs, snakes, cats, dogs, and an army of centipedes, scorpions and ants. In short, there were too many predators around. I have seen crows pouncing on these baby rats.

George inserted the drawer back into the cabinet. We began searching for the hole.

It was a mystery. There were no spaces under the doors that led to the outside. We checked the windows. They all had wire meshes. But in the work area, beside the kitchen, as George removed a bucket on a cement ledge, there was a circular hole that led to the outside. I assumed it was made to put in the pipe of the washing machine so that the water could run out.

He rolled a piece of thick cloth and pushed it in a few inches. It was now tight and blocked.

“The rat will get the smell of her babies, as soon as she comes near the wall,” said George. “It will not come inside anymore.”

I thanked George, gave him a cash token, and he left.

The next morning, when I came in, I got a shock. The cloth had been pushed aside. I called George. He looked surprised, as he stared at the hole.

“It looks like because of the rains, the mother could not detect the smell of her babies,” he said. “There is also the possibility the crows ate the babies one by one. The mother assumed the babies were in the drawer. She must have made a supreme effort to push the cloth away, to get at her babies. That is the power of the motherly instinct. Since animals live in close touch with nature, they have more intense feelings than us. It is more genuine too.”

Indeed, it would have taken hours to push aside the cloth.

I can imagine the devastation the rat must have felt to see all her babies had vanished. She must have realised she made a horrific blunder by sheltering the babies inside a human habitation.

George stepped outside.

He took a small stone and placed it at the entrance of the hole.

“Because the mother has lost its babies, there is little chance it will come back again,” he said.

He turned out to be right. The stone remains where it is.

And we stone-hearted human beings remain where we are.

We have re-confirmed to the mother rat and her friends we are the most heartless and cruellest beings on the planet.