Of Mice and Men (and Masculinity)

I’ve killed more mice and rats than I’d like to admit. I’ve killed them with a hockey that my mother bought me on a visit to our family village (the gift is one of life’s mysteries, I’ve never played hockey in my life), and with the bat and wickets I got for my 12^th birthday. Once, I even killed one with the long stick I had used that year to hoist the national flag outside my house on August 14.

Safe to say, killing rats isn’t a big deal. It is something mothers like mine semi-routinely wake up their sons to do, like taking out the trash or getting dahi. The effort taken for such a task is so miniscule that sons like me can promptly go back to sleep afterwards. In fact, I don’t even know if the ones I’ve been killing are rats or mice. And frankly I don’t care, I am not a zoologist. In this story, as in my general life, I will use the words interchangeably.

So I surprised myself earlier this year when I had to take a break from a rat-killing operation, because I had been at it for two hours to no avail. Even worse was admitting to myself that maybe I didn’t have it in me to kill a rat – at least this particular rat – and needed someone else to do it.

Rats are tiny, afraid and a mild inconvenience at best. In 2016, Peshawar’s administration put Rs 25 head money on each rat killed in the city to end a particularly nasty infestation. News channels had shown unforgettable images of children dangling multiple kills by their tails. In true Pakistani fashion, allegations soon emerged that the promised bounty payments from the government weren’t coming through. Our version of the Wild West I guess.

My mother had been hearing this particular rat around the house for a few days. My father, who thinks all women’s opinions deserve to be treated with skepticism, simply told her she was hearing things for weeks. At one point however, he found a packet of peanuts with a tear in its side, and broke the news of the mouse’s presence like he was the first to discover it.

For a couple of weeks, we all kept our ears on high alert. We were rewarded for our efforts when one day, we heard the mouse scurrying to the smallest room in the house. My father, eager to take the entire credit from discovery to elimination, said he would deal with it. About 10 minutes later, he reluctantly called my teenage brother for help. In another 10 minutes, my mother was at the foot of my bed to wake me up. Eventually, people turn to the man expected to get things done.

So, I proceeded to shut myself in the smallest room of my house with my teenage brother and nearly 70-year old father. Everyone was allowed to pick a weapon of their choice. The first step is removing the furniture, especially from the corners of the room. There was one particular corner where, like hardened detectives, we had found peanuts, and concluded this was the likely hiding spot.

What I had not taken into consideration is that the 14x10 room (life has forced me to memorise room dimensions, but that is another story) has been overcrowded with detritus over the course of my life. In the first few skirmishes with the admittedly huge rat, I realised that the massive clutter and presence of three grown men in a small space posed more dangers than possibilities.

I’d like to tell you that I decided to abandon our operation when the mouse scurried dangerously close to my brother’s feet, but that is only half true. The other half is that I was tired after repeatedly almost-hitting a mouse in a small room for close to two hours.

So, I locked the mouse in the room, and lay on a couch to think about how best to deal with the problem. My former-subeditor's brain remembered that in 2024, the National Assembly had actually allocated Rs 1.2 million to end rat infestation, and even considered employing hunting cats for the operation. Maybe that was it, I needed a hunter.

But before actually hiring someone, I needed to admit my shame out loud.

I cleared my throat, and suggested that I could call someone to kill the mouse. I used the word ‘pest control’ to make it sound more proper, but that did not stop multiple family members from looking at me like I had asked for my inheritance.

My brother, who I consider lazy, agreed immediately and switched on the TV. However, my father stared at me blankly. Meanwhile, my mother tried to appeal to my masculinity by asking why she had raised a son over six feet tall (raising someone exclusively to kill mice seems overkill to me). She used the Punjabi word ‘janra’ for man, which I have to admit stings more than its Urdu version. Still, when I told her that it was better to admit defeat than to risk someone getting bitten, she reluctantly agreed. After telling me one last time it wasn’t the manly thing to do, she went back to lawn shopping on Instagram.

Feeling vaguely superior at how unfazed I had been in the face of jabs at my masculinity, I decided to look up my options on the internet. There was a pest control business within 10 minutes of my house. I called the number, explained my problem and asked the man on the line if he could solve it. In a practiced salesman-y tone, the man added that ‘his team’ would put something in the affected room to handle the rat. I was slightly concerned that he had used the word ‘dawai’ instead of the ‘zeher’ I had expected to hear, but I kept my reservations to myself, and asked him what would happen next. He added that in one to two hours, the rat would come out into the open and die.

I was flattered that the man thought I lived in a mansion big enough where a rat could have one last stroll, and maybe even heave a dramatic sigh before collapsing, but it was far from the truth. In my cramped apartment, there was no ‘open space’ that the rat could venture into. I asked the man if he could kill the rat outright. He paused – I could hear his chair creaking through the phone – before telling me that his company doesn’t believe in killing the rats. I thanked him and hung up. I had no time for morals, and needed someone ruthless enough to get the job done. What kind of man refuses to kill a mouse, right?

I went back to my Google search, and scrolled through it, trying to decide by the name of the company if they would be brave enough to kill a rat instead of euthanizing it. After scrolling through about 15 results, I found my man. The company’s name seemed harmless enough, but the evidence of their methods was undeniable. Their page had a photograph of four dead rats laid out in a neat line.

I called the man and chose not to negotiate the Rs 5,000 fee quoted when he said he would kill the rat on sight. The man drove all the way from Rawalpindi and it took him about 40 minutes to arrive. I had spent these minutes going through the company’s photos. The money I was paying, and the photos of people in hazmat suits did a lot to raise my expectations. But when the man finally arrived, I had to do a double take. Forget a proper uniform, the man was wearing a faded purple shalwar kameez more crumpled than the one I had been wearing since the day before.

‘Aap hain jin ka chooha nahi mar raha?’ (Are you the one with the rat that won’t die?). Reminded of my shame, I simply nodded and invited him in, ignoring the fact I had been accused of mouse ownership.

Inside, I decided to take the normal precautions that we normally did when killing rats, including closing doors to all the other rooms in the house. But the man waved me off in my own house. Instead, he marched to the room, picked up the mystery hockey, started moving furniture around and asked me to get him a glass of water.

When I went to fill the glass, I heard a bang and the sound of my father laughing. I returned to find that the mouse bothering us for weeks had been killed in 30 seconds by the actual professional. Bangs, whimpers, and all that.

The disappointment must have shown on my face because the man consolingly told me that if he hadn’t killed the rat when he did, it would have made him run around for two hours as well. I thanked him and asked him for advice on how to mouse-proof my house in one last effort to get my money’s worth. He moved around the house spreading poison cubes, and told me that the rodent had either come inside from beneath one of the doors or from the toilet. He added that the latter is very common. Thank you Ali from pest control, I really needed that image in my head.

Perhaps the man also felt he hadn’t done enough. As I handed him the money, he asked us if we wanted to have the house sprayed. My father, a ventilation puritan, declined immediately. In response, the man told us, “Goray bhi spray nahi karwatay.” (The foreigners don’t let us spray either.) I ushered him out of the house before my father could engage with that line of reasoning. He took the mouse’s body in a bag with him.

I prepared myself for a few more sarcastic rejoinders as I closed the door and returned to my family, but surprisingly, there weren’t any. Both my parents were on their phones, and my mother, in a poetic mood, contributed a “khoda pahar nikla chooha” when she saw me enter. My brother had put on a Bulbulay episode on TV. In the episode, the family hires a snake charmer to get rid of a snake in the house, but the man ends up robbing them. I told myself that things could always be worse; at least we had not been robbed. At most, I had endured a few moments of embarrassment in having to hire another man to kill a mouse in my house, and that kind of embarrassment is worth getting over anyway.