Tryst with Mole-ji

                                                                         Tryst with Mole-ji

Today is the birthday of Lord Ganesha, the remover of all obstacles. The birth of the elephant- headed god, son of Parvati was one of immaculate conception. When we visualize Ganeshji, he appears as a cute baby, cherubic, pot bellied and forever sporting an innocent smile. Sitting or standing, dancing or playing or gorging on rice dumplings with jaggery at the centre, he looks cuddly and adorable. It is a widely followed Indian tradition to seek Ganeshji’s blessings before embarking on any new activity. Among all the Gods worshipped by the Hindus, Ganeshji shares his loveable image with baby Krishna, though he, unlike the latter is not known to play pranks.

It has been an annual feature in my home to see a mole making his entry close on to Ganesh Chaturthi. I am fond of the Mole though he creates enough damages all round, nibbling at books and clothes not to leave out any tidbits that come in his way. Maybe my liking is linked to my love for Ganeshji who uses the mole as his mount. Any how the fact is the mole is also cute and flits through from point to point at jet speed. One can even succeed in catching a leviathan on a fish net, but catching the mole is a maddening impossibility. I don’t think even Usain Bolt can keep pace with the mole.

I recall having seen the English series on the Mole by the Czech director animator Zdenek Miler and the 1993 Charles Grosvenor’s film Once Upon a Forest featuring a young mouse, mole and hedgehog risking their lives to find a cure for their badger friend who had been poisoned by men. Then there is the all popular Tom and Jerry film centering on a rivalry between Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse. Tom rarely succeeds in catching Jerry because of Jerry’s cleverness, exceptional abilities and luck. Similarly when the mole makes its surprise and split second entry, I am at a loss to keep track of his movements. I bolt all the windows and doors but even through the tiniest crevice he flashes through in less than a blink of the eye.

He is so cute that one does not have the heart to kill the mole or even hurt him. The best way is to entice him with buttered bread placed in a mousetrap so that he  eats and gets trapped and one can release him  far away from home. But most of our local makes are not contraptions but  con-traptions. Before one can place the tiny buttered bread or chapati in the hook, the spring loaded metal bar gets released to trap our fingers that are at least half a centimeter thicker than the breadth of the mole. But what is most embarrassing is that after all the cautious and gingerly efforts at placing the temptation in the trap, we soon find the bread piece missing, with no sign of the culprit. The bars of the trap are teeny-weeny wide for the mole to flit in and flit out.

Having failed with the mousetrap, I asked my kirana shop owner to provide me with some device to trap but  not to kill moleji.  For the first time, he was quick to respond and said that the fertile jugaad invention of the Indian mind has made a new device out of card boards bound like a book. The inside of this book, he said, is coated with glue and when this is placed on the mole’s track, it will get glued to it. I was delighted and proud of the raw Indian ingenuity and paid a whopping hundred rupees and returned home. I could not wait to open the book-alike invention but just as I wrenched open the book-trap I got my hand stuck to the glue, and as I tried to release my hand with the other that also got stuck in it. I had to shout for help to be released from the book-trap, not before getting my dress also glued to it. My neighbours helped me by pulling me away as though they were playing the tug-of war game and I was finally released from the book trap after being pulled apart from all sides. I shyly gave a lengthy explanation to them paying myself a compliment that I was overflowing with milk of kindness towards moleji and hence this book trap was bought to catch him and release him without killing him. There was quite a bit of smirk on their faces as they took leave, leaving me to find the right place to keep the trap on. It was late in the evening and I switched off the kitchen light and placed the trap near the kitchen door.

Before I retired to bed, I peeped into the kitchen to see a small creature wriggling to get out of the book trap. I switched on the lights and to my horror of horrors it was not moleji but a lizard. I have like many others the lizard phobia. How on earth am I going to throw the lizard out? All my family members said that it was my idea to get a book trap and so I had to find a way out to release the lizard. I decided to take the lizard call in the morning and went to bed. I could not get to sleep and on those rare few minutes when fatigue overpowered me, I dreamt abou  the lizard jumping all over me while I attempted the good Samaritan work of releasing it. I recalled the famous Tamil proverb that speaks of the clay moulder’s attempt at making Ganesh and ending with making a monkey. Here I was with a lizard on hand in place of the moleji.

As the first rays of the dawn broke in, I went tip-toed into the kitchen to see the mole and the lizard glued to the trap  and struggling to free themselves. They squired themselves round and round the square trap, as though they were at a merry- go-round. I was now caught in a trap of my own making. I understood the smirk on the neighbours’ faces the previous night. Everyone was asleep and I carefully caught the booktrap by the ends and went out to find a place to leave it. I found a place near a drain pipe and left the trap patting myself for my heroism.

Two hours later I had a cop and two burly men at my door. They asked me to go out with them and I found a large number of my neighbours and their families near the drain pipe watching a crow and a cat ensnared along with moleji and the lizard. I was asked to pay fine for defiling the drain pipe and a hefty sum to the burly fellows to release the foursome from the book trap. “What about the book-trap? Do you want it back?” asked the cop.  I shrieked “No! Never!, even as my neighbours mumbled crocodile commiseration for my 100 plus another 1000 rupees down the drain. I came home to see Ganeshji with his impish smile waiting for his jaggery dumplings.

P.S.

I have reliably learnt( not through any mole) that PM Modi has pleased Lord Ganesha to such an extent that not a mole is allowed to enter his office and poor media is thus starved of breaking news.