Mad Scientist: Ashish

DISCLAIMER: Since Ashish asked me not to write anything about him in my blog, this is not about him. This is about.. well.. a mad scientist. Who used to be my room mate. :P

1st, switch off that liquidator. no seriously. switch it off. if you have a mosquito coil thats burning, put that out too. throw out all the mosquito repellent creams n bullshit. cos when you are done reading this post, you will be an enlightened person. you will have a brand new way of getting rid of mosquitoes.

WARNING: Expect heavy side effects.Even death. but mosquitoes gone. for sure.

With that said, its story time. The year was 2005 (probably). And i was in hostel. you see, how comfortable you are in hostel, depends on lot of factors. Friends, room mates, canteen, bathrooms (goooosh.. read my last post), chicks in the girls hostel across the building (very imp..) and finally your room itself. now, it isn't really nice if you have a long complaint list about your room. we did. but we could live through it fortunately. But there was this one problem that kept us awake all night. literally.yes that was mosquitoes. Our room was a breading ground for mosquitoes. under the bed, gzzzzzzzzzzz.. above your head, gzzzzzzzzz.. in the shelf, gzzzzzzzz.. inside dirty clothes, gzzzzzzzz.. WTF.. every night it was like, our body is the bar and mosquitoes would get drunk like hell.. we tried every thing possible. liquidators, coils, creams n what not.. but these were some sort of super mutant mosquitoes that swore to drink up every last drop of blood in our body. it was getting totally impossible to sleep. And just about the time, when we were about to conclude that nothing could be done, our mad scientist stepped forward for our rescue. well atleast that is what he intended to do.

it was around 8 pm. time for dinner. i believe i was taking bath or something. i was a bit late. i found the rooms empty. everyone had already left. except ashish.i was standing near the door and i had a gut feeling that told me he's doing something crazy. well, it wasn't actually a gut feeling. when he's alone, he's surely upto something crazy. he used to keep all the books and notebooks stacked up on the table like he's building a miniature version of NYC. there was hardly place for anything else. but through the gap between the stack of book, i could c a cleaning sponge. maintaining a safe distance from the table (he might be making some sort of an explosive. with this guy, you can never be sure) i asked him what was he upto now? he told me he's going to get rid of the mosquitoes. i dared to step closer and take a look. i saw the complete apparatus. but it didn't really make any sense to me at first. there was a cleaning sponge as i told you. what i missed the first time was a small plate and a liquidator's refill. you know, the small bottle with some liquid that you put into the liquidator machine. with the sponge on the plate, he broke open the bottle and poured the liquid content on the sponge. i still had no clue what he was doing. then it all made sense when he pulled it out from his pocket. a damn matchbox. i said in bold clear words. WHAT THE FUCK??. before i could tell him anything, he lit the whole thing up. it had a small firework kind of starting. a big flame, but then it started burning like some ordinary sponge. i found myself shouting at him, telling him to move it away from all the book n papers. he lifted it using some cloth. someone's underpants. i'm sure about this. whenever he needed to clean or dust something(and lift hot objects), he used someone else's underpants. he placed in on the floor in middle of the room. we closed the doors and windows and left for dinner. on our way to dinner he had a big grin on his face and he told me that there wasn't going to be any sign of mosquitoes tonight. i actually knew that already. cos with the kind of smoke that his little invention was giving out, not even a human could survive in that room for more than couple of minutes. it was dense. dense as in, real dense. and black. imagine tar in vapor form. it was like that.

when we came back to the room...... i don't know how to put it in words. i had trouble making up my mind that it was actually my room. you see, when a volcano erupts or something, you have this volcanic ash that comes out and it settles all over the place. like snowfall. but gray and dirty that's hard to get rid of. it was pretty close in my case. only difference was that, it wasn't volcanic and it wasn't gray. it was black. just like the smoke, it was black. a thin coating over everything that was left exposed.

i had to leave pretty soon after that to my uncle's place, couple of streets off my hostel, cos my parents had come to Chennai for a couple of days. i really felt bad cos i would not be able to enjoy the one mosquito-less night in the hostel but i'll have to clean all my stuffs when i come back. its like you have to pay for a meal that you never had. when i got home that night, my mom asked me what exactly was i doing in hostel before i left. of course, i was standing in the room for sometime and the dust had also settled upon me. head, eye lashes, hair on my hands, everything had a black coating to it. i gave her the who story and everyone was really amused.

when i came back to my room, i had to clean all my stuffs. change my bedcover, pillow cover, dust my book and shelf and every small piece of thing on my shelf.but for some reason i wasn't upset. may be i knew it would make a good blog post in the future.

oh, by the way, guys told me, there wasn't any sign of mosquito for next couple of days. Hats off to our mad scientist!!!


thx for reading. pls comment.