Tamil woman in the good old days, surprised by a tiger when she was winnowing the rice, thrashed the ferocious animal with her winnowing fan without batting an eyelid. The quadruped, taken aback by the pluck of the biped, knew its game was up and hastily withdrew. However, such a plucky woman might have shaken like a jelly had she come face to face with a cockroach, its antennae twitching threateningly, in the confines of her dingy kitchen.
Cockroaches exist from the times of the dinosaur. They can live without their head for a week, without food for a month and having mated once, can be pregnant for ever (my god!). A cockroach, unlike a tiger, can vertically take off like a chopper and land on the tip of a woman’s nose. Why it does not attack a man is a mystery.
The cockroach in Chennai that made news not only landed on a woman’s nose but also travelled through her nostril and rested in her skull base, close to the brain in between her eyes. Really! The doctors, rather otolaryngologists, struggled using nasal endoscopy, clamps and such and finally removed the intruder, despite the narrow space available for the invasive procedure. Though the lady can hereafter breathe unhindered, we are not told whether the intruder was DOA.
Methods of extermination of cockroaches women deploy are varied. The commonest is stepping on one, provided she is wearing a pair of slippers in the kitchen, a taboo in orthodox homes. An experienced woman would for good measure press hard with a vibratory motion, like a smoker after dropping a burning cigarette butt. She would know that a cockroach can even survive a nuclear holocaust.
Barefooted women, who are battle-ready, would keep two long broomsticks propped on the veranda walls like spears in palaces. At the fleeting sight of a cockroach, she would take the brooms, one in each hand, manoeuvre like a hunky wrestler in a WWF ring, choosing which way to move. If she waves the broom to left, the cockroach will move to the right and so forth, but the marauder might suddenly prefer an aerial attack and fly targeting the lady’s nose tip. But that may be a tactical blunder because the woman would raise both the broomsticks over her head and clash them like a cymbal player in a brass band, the flyer squashed in between. No, this will not be a newsworthy item. But what the doctors of Chennai’s Stanley hospital did to the cheeky, nosey parker who infiltrated into the woman’s nostril in the night indeed is!
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