The Phobia

I was in school then, class 10th probably. I am terribly afraid of reptiles, especially lizards. Once, very recently, I waited for an hour or so for dad to come and unlock the door for me because there was a lizard on the ceiling above the locked door of my house. Sometimes, I marvel at my imbecility.  

She adjusted her spaghetti top as her mother kept ordering her around. All the stuff from her room was being shifted to her mum and dad’s. Their residence was an inferno of things pell-mell about the house. She was trying to be as careful & quick as possible in obeying her mother. Although she was damn exhausted, she knew that her mother’s agony was greater.

There had been no power supply since two hours. Their guests had just left. Her brother had been stationed at the bed near the computer table to keep a lookout for the reptile. It was this hell of a thing which was the key reason for their world turned upside down. The entire family was frantic,that is, if you count her sense of obedience, his younger brother’s know-it-all attitude and her dad’s desperate efforts to humour his wife and most importantly, her mother’s lizard phobia which had turned out to be a menace.

There was a huge bang but it had missed its target. The cold-blooded beast darted inside. It seemed to be quite an experienced one, knew where to hide itself from the prying eyes of the family. Niti’s mother was probably the only person who was always keen to avoid lizards. She detested pariplanetas, ants, crickets, moths-yes- but she more than loathed lizards. She shuddered at the thought of the little animal. Soft, brown and skinny with two little black slits for sight and a life-saving tail (which it has probably shed thousands of times), this cousin of gecko was, for her, Satan himself, in all his appalling crudity.

Niti’s father dived but could muster just a few roaches from under the bed. Her brother, however, had four araneas to his credit, which he handed over to her and dashed off to fetch their special “life” bottles which housed all kinds of grotesque “treasures”, some of them including ants, caterpillars and so on.

A jubilant scream erupted from the depths of the cupboard, followed almost immediately by a terrifying yell. The two siblings rushed to the scene as their dad picked up the irritating animal from their mum’s shoulders and chucked it away in the bin. Finally, after all that scramble, they had caught hold of the culprit.

As the residents of no. XX returned to normal activity, Niti suddenly caught sight of two slits behind her study table. Her eyebrows disappeared into her forehead as she detected a peculiar, weird as it was, twinkle in the little reptile’s eyes.