Punishment

I switched on the pump but it didn’t start. It was meant to carry municipal water to an overhead tank  and from there down to the taps in my second floor flat. If the taps were to run dry, I would join the ranks of endangered species.

The electrician said, “Ah ha!  Looks like a rat has bitten off the wires. You have no connection.”

“Can’t you fix it?” I asked in alarm.

“I can, but you need to catch the rats.”

One evening, a large field rat showed up in the dining room. It peeped from under a sideboard and quickly ran out of my sight. I knew immediately where to set up a trap. 

Amazon delivered a set of glue pads for catching rats. Next morning our gleeful maid pointed out the trapped biggie staring helplessly at me. 

Quite obviously it lived inside a dark hole in the plot of land where our building stood. From there, it had climbed up to my flat. It was unaccustomed to daylight.

In the distant past, before our house came up, the plot was empty, a free territory where the rat’s forefathers must have lived in peace. But my ancestors arrived and a concrete structure stood right above their cosy underground homes. They might have considered us trespassers then. Over time though, we turned into the trespassed. 

I told the maid to throw the prisoner into a passing garbage truck. She giggled.

a pilloried man
goes to the gallows
dark ages

Slightly revised version of a haibun first published in haikuKATHA, Issue 33, July 2024
© Dipankar Dasgupta