I stare at it morbidly. It's there, right in front of my eyes viewing me with its beady oculi and I keep staring right back at it. Or maybe it's just my imagination playing games with me. How can a gecko keep staring at me as though I were the only object in its line of sight? Yet rationalisations and practicalities aside, I continue to stare at it, caught up in the fascination of what makes a gecko tick - or should I call stick - to walls.I have never been a hater of wild animals. On the contrary, my epitaph would probably talk about my dreaded fear of the many and varied creatures of the animal kingdom. Lizards, snails, earthworms, caterpillars, dragon flies...blah, blah...I can keep on going but I am sure, the point must have gotten across. Ironically, I have never been afraid of cockroaches and spiders, even though many of my contemporaries shudder at the very mention of these two creepy-crawlies. I sometimes wonder if this is an aberration to the very existence of fearing creepy insects by human beings. This wondering is substantiated with my currently failing and ailing de facto quest to find a fellow human who is scared of lizards, making me further underscore my point with much more vehemence than I would ever want to acknowledge.
Getting back to the point; the gecko on the wall is mid-sized, has dark rings or circles or whatever is regarded to be grammatically right to talk about a gecko's skin tone. It has a longish tail and four spindly legs, which look so wobbly that I am sure will not be able to support it as it climbs higher on the wall. Yet it climbs and climbs and just like that - starts hovering above my head like a mass of oblongated dirt. The stare which was morbid, now fast exceeds the levels of paranoia and psychosis.
And I am not feeling paranoia without any rhyme or reason. Having a family background which charts the course of a lizard's travel up on the walls with superstition and orthodoxy, I have developed a fear that the lizard scampering on the ceiling will fall on my head where the superstition reads, 'Lizard falling over one's head being equivalent to a near and dear one expiring.' My father scoffs at this rationale - I have to remind myself that he was the one who put this fear in me in the first place - while my mother pretends to be deaf. It's like being caught up from three different sides...left, right and above!
Considering the fact that I live in a metro - Mumbai was , is and will be - it's kind of weird to be stating superstition and astrological charts. But there again, Mumbai comes in India and when in India, think and do as the vintage Indians do. At least, that's what I pacify myself with...
The gecko meanwhile, has found an outlet to scarper and I find myself heaving a big sigh of relief. To the best of my knowledge, till that point I never knew that I was actually holding my breadth or following the course of the lizard's movements so carefully. But anyway, the gecko's gone and my attention reverts back to the football match going on between Arsenal and Manchester United; there's my favourite team socking the Gunners left, right and centre and where was my focus...riveted on to a dark coloured gecko...prioritising, I never did learn that.
I get back to the game...the eighth goal for Manchester and am whooping for glory when I see it again in the periphery of my eyesight - the gecko with the spangled skin...and once again my eyes start pinpointing its progress as though it's just going to leap out from the wall and make a straight dash to my prestiged head!
