Faith or coincidence?

Well to begin with I had never in my life seen rat droppings to recognise it but now can add it to my list of expertise, I’m also well experienced now to tell if it’s fresh or stale.

We found rat feces on one of our sites just when it was nearing the handover period & everyone was so nervous after, that all contractors / workers and our team got on to solving this one strange problem.

It was then that we got our best pest control man Sharad on this special assignment and then began the strategies to investigate and find a solution to the rat droppings, never was I aware of how challenging this would be nor was this on our interior design syllabus.

Everyday after work timings were done we would soak bread in oil and experiment with other food items that rats enjoyed to put in the mouse traps. We bought all the variety in cages from glue ones, double glue ones etc in all sizes, shapes you can possibly imagine.

We tried all kinds of psychology like one night we would leave the lights on and windows open and the other night lights off, windows open. Sharad Holmes would have theories about the rat being quite big in size and an old elderly one and would try to decode from where it might be entering the home, like sometimes that its in the ceiling or might have come up through the plumbing pipes into the house and so on..

Every day after work we would meet Sharad to strategise and plan how to lay out the traps with the food which surprisingly sometimes was even kandha bhajiyas at one point to make sure that the its not because the rat didn’t like our bread 😂

We learnt few things too like you cannot touch the food with your bare hands, is what we were told, as rats can sense the human interference with it and hence see it as danger.

In the mornings we would look for signs, sometimes a few pieces of the food would be eaten, sometimes rat shit found in some new places, or a small scratch on the wallpaper sometimes. There was evidence for sure. But not a rat to be seen anywhere.

This went on for a couple of days or more and after a last visit by another pest control specialist we finally gave up, as we couldn’t possibly do more than we already had by now. By this time the site had progressed quite a bit and we were beginning to install the last pieces of furniture.

Amongst other items were the clients Moortis, which had a lord Ganesha Moorti , and the Contractors, us and the clients in consensus decided to place the Ganesha first praying that our problem be resolved.

And miraculously that’s what happened.
Fortunately or unfortunately we never found a rat.
The clients are living there comfortably for a year now without any troubles. I’m not sure if it was our belief in Vigna harta Ganesha, or just a coincidence coz the irony is that mostly rats are found where Ganesha is.

P.S- I met Sharad recently and we were having a nice laugh about this. I asked him what really happened as per him? He said “Madam woh chuha buddha hai, thak ke retire ho ke chala gaya hai 😂