Live and let Live

Since multitasking is much encouraged, our kitchen, pantry, dining and TV room are one and the same. This means that we can prepare our food, cook it, eat and watch TV all at once (I do not recommend this.) Anyway, last night was a typical Sunday night. Until...

So my brother was not at home. My grandmother was watching a TV program while my mother and I watched it and had dinner. And then I said, "OMG huge cockroach" and all hell broke loose. We tried to ignore the fellow until we realized it could fly. It was then that we left the kitchen. The TV program was important to my grandmother, so instead of locking our selves in our rooms, we all stood near our bedrooms, trying to follow the program.

Since I left my food on the kitchen table, I went back for it. Then I saw a gecko was trying to eat the roach, and shooed away the gecko with a broom. This excited the roach, and thus my mother and grandmother. Then I realized this guy was harmless, and sat in the kitchen enjoying dinner. After sometime, my mother had the guts to come wash her plate. She then screamed when she found the roach in our sink. And the sink had a thin layer of water so this guy could neither fly away nor crawl out of the sink.

Enter Good Samaritan. Now to understand what we did with the roach, here's what we usually do when a cockroach tries to call our home, its home.

We wait for the guy to get on the floor, and then we (sadly, I’m the one who has to do this) trap it in a big container, making sure it won’t get squashed. We then run a paper underneath it, and push the container out of our house.

Yes, you may ask why we don't spray some Mortein but I'll get to that later.

Now last night the Good Samaritan was faced with a serious issue. The stupid cockroach was stuck in a sink. So even if I did trap him in a container, how would I get him out of the sink?
So I had to trap him in a container, then get a plastic file, somehow slip it under the container. Then run my hand under the file and gently raise the container without allowing the cockroach to escape. I then took it outside and let it go.

I didn't just type this out hoping the more I talk about it, the more likely my chance of getting into heaven (truth be told, I don't want to go to heaven, ever!)

Now we go back to the question of insect repellant. It took us around thirty minutes of screaming, hiding and planning to get rid of the cockroach. Insect repellant would have done the job in two seconds. Yet, spraying the poor guy with insect repellant would have killed it, and right behind cheaters in my 'most hated list' are killers.

I do not only mean those who kill humans. Or those who kill large animals. But those who kill anything. I do swat at mosquitoes, but I do so unconsciously. I do not have that intention to kill, but sometimes when the zzz of a mosquito just won’t go away, ah the mind requires a lot of control.

I was brought up in a home where no one is killed. The once in a blue moon rat who manages to creep into our house forces us to lock our selves in our rooms for the night. The next morning we borrow a rat cage thing to catch the fellow and later let him out into the wild. And until someone who works for my uncle takes it away, we feed the rat and keep it happy.

I spend most of my life saving insects, ants are the worst out of them all, from drowning. They seem to be everywhere, which means that I'll have to forget the glass of water to cool my burning mouth after a spicy meal to save a tiny ant from death.

Don't think I'm complaining about the way I was brought up. I am thankful that my mother discouraged animal killing. This makes me value life more. I'm more thankful for each day, because life is something to be appreciated. I'm happy that no one thought, "Oh! Shailee is annoying, I'll just squash her."

Not killing also makes it easier to stick by my other principles. Like give when I can. I look at an ant and think to my self, live and let live. Don't do to others what you do not wish for your self. So I look at a beggar and think, "Wouldn't I want money if I was in his/her situation?"

I pass a mosque everyday, after work. And since Muslims are fasting now, I pass the mosque close to the time they break fast. So there will be hoards of people walking into the mosque and none of them stop to give a coin or two to the beggars who sit by. Maybe they beg for the wrong reasons. Maybe they feed their drug addiction instead of their starving child. But who are we to judge? Don't think about a man's motives when he asks for something from you. Just give, if you can.

I've also seen so many empty handed beggars near kovils, temples and churches. It makes me question the so called religiousness of those who go to such places and worship or pray. I know the Buddha always encouraged the act of giving. Have not the god/gods of other faiths also told us to give?

Back to killing; do not kill. My respect and liking for a person decreases when I hear they kill. It could be a rat or a cockroach. Just don't kill. As someone who desperately fights for the rights of mosquitoes, it wouldn't hurt to part with some blood. I know that if you've had say dengue or malaria, you would want to strangle me. But nature has her reasons. Mosquitoes were meant to live on blood for a reason. And people were supposed to fall sick for a reason. And we all die, again, for a reason.

You may say by killing the mosquito, you are saving your self and others from falling ill. But here's the thing, if it was meant to be, you would fall sick whether or not you kill that mosquito. And why kill if it won’t change things?

There is a story about a goat who escapes from a slaughterhouse. But while running away towards freedom, the branch of a tree falls on it, killing the goat. We can't escape karma. We can't avoid it. (This might be a slightly different version from the real story. But I heard this during a Bana sermon some time back and my mind has a way of slightly editing the stories I hear!)

And yet, maybe the mosquito was meant to die. And maybe it was at your expense.