Have you ever been bothered by tigers? Or lions? Or elephants? Or any other such huge animals? Once on our trip to Yellowstone National Park, we saw a herd of huge bison, hundreds of them, crossing the road quietly. Wonderfully disciplined and going in rows. Nobody was disturbed or scared. The cars and other vehicles had just stopped to let them go. It is incidentally a protected area for bison.

But what are those creatures that I am troubled by? Or scared of?

It is the tiniest of tiny ones—the mosquitoes, the bees, the ants, the cockroaches. The biggest among them are the lizards.

Which of these deserves the most attention or a grand write-up? I will take the biggest one first—the lizards. The very name sends shivers. I am not scared of looking at them, which doesn’t mean I will pet or pat them. My wife is terrified of even looking at them. I had written about an event where, when I was in a rural place, my elder son got scared of something and had a continuous fever, and one of my colleague’s moms came from a long distance away to take care of him. We later realized that my wife, on seeing a lizard, had shrieked in terror, and that perhaps caused panic to my son, who was just one and a half years old. He kept looking at the wall for quite some time until his fever subsided.

I had a similar experience with lizards, but not of the shrieking type. I was around 20 when, while having curd rice, I saw something like an onion peel. On asking my mom, she tried to pick it up, and guess what? It was a tiny lizard. I ran to the bathroom to vomit. Afraid I would have been poisoned by this, I asked everyone in that small community for homemade remedies. After consuming whatever they had suggested, I lived through the next few days in mortal fear. I am just now typing, right? That means I survived.

Thereafter, I try to ensure I am never sitting near a wall or under any wooden beam.

Have you heard of ‘palli josiyam’? Palli means lizard and josiyam means astrology.

Continued in 227. Tiniest Terrors - Part 2