The Elizabethans

About a week back, I had a house guest. Not one I particularly invited, so, perhaps, a house crasher. At first we openly hated each other, and since he was not paying my rent and I was not cooking his meals, it was okay for us to have this dysfunctional hate-hate relationship. But then I soon realised that since my sister and brother-in-law were out of town, the only other person I knew in the city who could speak English and Kannada was staying in my house, being actively hated by me.

So we changed tactics. I started treating him like a necessary evil and he limited himself to shuffling around my living room, particularly checking out the insects in the Tubelight Area. I even started calling him by his given name. Elizabeth and I shared a somewhat peaceful coexistence, although he did not take kindly to my mocking his love handles, seeing how, in his own words, i was a "Minute Maid swilling fat basket" myself. Not that I was particularly hurt. Nobody but nobody takes shit from a transvestite house lizard called Elizabeth.

I got back earlier this week from a lizard-free weekend in Bangalore, to find an absconding house guest. It's been six days, and there is still no sign of Elizabeth. Not that I miss him. Or anything. And he did leave behind the fruit of his fantasy pregnancy: I now have a small annoying giggly boy lizard with big black beady eyes, haunting the same Tubelight Area, mocking me in an an alarmingly Elizabethan manner, althought minus the love handles. His name is Shane. As in, you know, Warne. And he is definitely straight.

There is even less love lost between Shane and me. I am hoping he goes back to his father's soon enough. I prefer living alone, although I won't punctuate it in the manner of obviously single middle-aged fiction-literature icons by wearing a tattered wedding gown and stopping all the clocks.*




* Reference to Auden poem unintended.