The Night of the Cobra

The night that I imagined a piece of fabric-string was a cobra, there was a gecko in my room. The Night of the Gecko just doesn't sound quite so magnificent, does it? Cobra, iguana, all good. Gecko, nah. Give it a miss. It'll never fly in Poughkeepsie.

The gecko had been hanging out outside my door, where all the wasps, bees and geckos hangout because there's a light right outside my door that illuminates the entire Lotus Patio area. I turned it off my first night in the room at 10 p.m. when I went to bed and it was promptly switched back on by the staff as otherwise hotel and dinner guests would be stumbling around the potted plants and crashing down the crumbling stairs.

He crawled inside, heading for the light of my candles. I blew them out and said "Get out." Then I said "You don't want my company, you want to go back outside and be with all your friends," because I thought I should try being persuasive like Raveen rather than flat out mean and mad. Neither worked.

I heard him crawl in and make like a herd of cows was behind him across my wall. He stopped not far from my head.

Free Advice from the Good Mini-angel sitting on my shoulder: Oh but why would it matter, Eufemia? Don't let this disturb you. Geckos are sooo cuuuuuute. Some people get gecko tattoos!

My response: Uhm, shaddup!

Perhaps an excerpt from Swamiji could explain my concern: "These many problem make. Many die in village, like this, this coming (points to a gecko near our yoga class) in tree, sometime, fall down, is like, when time for prepare food, and they (gestures putting his palm flat) and then like this. Yeah. So many people is like dying." Blogger's note: When Swamiji says 'is like' he means 'it is'. Just like it took me awhile to get that 'as like' means 'like this'. Therefor 'is like dying' in this context means means 'many people die this way' Understand my concern? Not so funny, my fear o' the old gecko monster now, is it? Cute my patootie.


We all stared at him confused, but I tell you I still laugh thinking about the look on Mincho's face. Between him and Swamiji, sometimes the english would get so fragmented, and sometimes Mincho would ask me to say it to him in Italian and he would make the appropriate translation into Spanish, at which point I'm surprised it never came to a pistols at dawn scenario because you know my skill with Italian. I can only imagine some of my translations came out like this: "Swamiji was been saying that yesterday, in the future, you have tried again you do will this pose, yes?"

So Swamiji said Gecko and many people is like dying and Mincho stared at him and said "Sorry, could you explaining this for me another time?"

Yeah, we were all good to hear that warning again. But this is what I understood by the end; either these geckos fall out of trees into the dinner dal pot when nobody's looking, and they die in the pot and somehow dinner gets dished out without anyone noticing the dead gecko in the bottom of the pot and then everyone's eaten a poisonous dinner, or, possibly the gecko sprays it's poison like a skunk, when it's afraid. I'm not sure how it's spray/urine get's into the dinner pot in the second example, but somehow it does and again, people dying is The End. Full stop.

Okay then, so I tried falling asleep but I couldn't breathe out of my nose so I was cursing the fact that I'd be a mouth-breather for the night, and I was terrified that this stupid gecko would spray me in the face and I would get killed. Ostensibly murdered by a gecko going to the bathroom. Can you imagine? At the time, (2:30 a.m. in the morning and with 5 bad sleeps beforehand) I could think of nothing worse, even the thought of a coconut landing on my head seemed a preferable way to say goodbye. (According to the fella from Kerala, people die climbing coconut trees and wiping out, not from coconuts landing on their heads. Well that's one less thing to worry about, thank goodness)

Is it any wonder that 15 minutes later, when that gecko crawled closer to me, I had forgotten all about it and thought the creepy sound effect was a cobra behind me? And did you know, when blowing out a candle, it makes a slight hissing noise? I mean, I knew that, but wow, I never paid attention to it like that before.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.