Ashriek from the kitchen startled me out of my reverie. I went to the kitchen to investigate. The wife said, “I saw a mouse darting into the kitchen.” Our house had only two outlets, the front door and the balcony door. Both the doors were closed. There was no chance of a mouse gaining entry into the house.
“Are you sure it was a mouse?” I asked. “It looked like a mouse. Whatever it is, it has to be removed from the kitchen. Otherwise, I will not be able to cook dinner,” warned the wife.
I advised her to sit at an elevated place to avoid any confrontation with a frightened mouse. I removed a curtain rod from a pelmet, went into the kitchen and rattled a tin to scare the mouse out. The rodent refused to show up. I closed the kitchen door and shifted tins, bottles, jars and vessels from one corner to another and combed every inch of the kitchen. There was no mouse.
I told the wife, “You probably imagined it.” “It was a mouse. I am sure,” she insisted and pointed out that there was a gap between the kitchen door and the floor. “The mouse would have escaped through the gap and would have taken refuge in the bedroom or storeroom”, she said. I realised that every door in the house had a gap wide enough for a mouse to pass through.
The bedroom was easy to search. There was nothing on the floor. The storeroom and bathroom were cleared. There was still no sign of the mouse. I pushed the refrigerator away from the wall and detected the tail of a rat on the compressor. I used the rod to threaten the rat.
It jumped off the refrigerator and ran for its life as I pursued it. The trail went cold near a washing machine close to the wall. I moved and turned the machine on its side and found that its underside had space for a dozen rats to take cover. Indeed, the scared rat had taken refuge under the machine. With the help of the rod, I evicted the rodent from the machine.
The wife had thoughtfully held ajar the balcony door. The rat ran out into the dark night. The wife was still sceptical. She said she saw a mouse in the kitchen and what ran out of the house was a rat. I was in no mood for another round of mouse-hunt.
I bought a mousetrap, put a cookie inside and left it in the kitchen overnight. Next morning, the mousetrap remained untenanted. The wife said that it did not prove that there was no mouse inside the house. That was how the mousetrap became a permanent fixture in the kitchen.