My rat in shining armour

I noticed the other day that some mysterious nocturnal creature has been frantically digging up my garden. Every morning I wake up to find holes all over the place, and beside each hole a pile of mud heaped like an offering of flowers in a temple. I fill up the holes only to find them dug up once more in the night. Soon I notice they're not holes, but tunnels, and quite deep ones at that. One leads from my garden to the coconut grove behind. The other vanishes somewhere into the ground.

When one night I heard the sound of gnawing, I knew who the mysterious digger was. A rat, I thought.

And I understood why suddenly the frogs had given up wooing me and hopped back into the garden. The rat had been frightening them off.

I was absurdly grateful to the rat whom I finally spotted one night scrabbling up my kitchen wall and rushing out in haste. Better one rat who runs away from me than many slimy frogs trying to get into my bed, I thought. But at the same time I knew, rather regretfully, that I would have to rid myself of my knight in shining armour.

Off with it's head, I thought sadly, feeling rather like the bloodthirsty duchess in Alice in Wonderland. But even after the rat had been dispatched with some poisonous rat chocolate, the tunneling continued.

'It's an oonoor who did it,' Babuli the village idiot told me in Marathi, spotting the tunnels when I called him in to chase three squawking hens out of my garden. 'A kohinoor we call it.'

'A mon-goose,' Munni, a fat Muslim woman of the neighbourhood, pronounced as she came up panting to claim her hens who are in the habit of laying eggs all over the place.

'A bandicoot,' someone who spoke English later explained.

'A kind of rat,' someone else said. 'Use rat poison.'

I put some rat poison into the hole. But the mysterious tunneling still went on.

Acting on yet more advice, this morning I broke two wine bottles and buried the glass shards in the tunnel. I am hoping it will do the trick.

Sometimes the absurdity of what I'm doing strikes me.

It seems ironic that while the big bad world beyond my bit of paradise is fighting a modern evil with sophisticated weaponry, millions in the villages still continue to battle a stone-age enemy with sticks and stones and bits of glass. Rats, snakes, scorpions, bandicoots, pests who attack crops, leopards who wander in from the jungle - these are the real terrorists. The others are actors on tv, as unreal as villains in a Bollywood film.