Thus Saith the Landlord

In the first month, it was rats.  I was proud of how I handled the rats.

Then, I sweated through power outages that left me stranded in a rooftop apartment in temperatures well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit.  As I lost half my body mass through my pores, I took to sleeping in a wet nightgown to ward off the heat.

A few weeks later it was a dust storm that left an inch of nasty red-black dust over everything in my apartment.

Now, friends, the Lord has sent me mold.  There is no polite way to talk about this. (I should add that mold is not, as near as I can tell, "an Indian thing.")

I returned from a free-wheeling trip to Bangalore only to find that everything in my tiny apartment was furred with whorls of green mold.  There was mold on my walls and ceiling, in my pillows, my sheets and all over the clothes in my cupboard.  There was mold on my fridge and in the linings of my shoes.  Mold spotted the collar of my only formal business suit, festered in the pouch of my $1000 digital camera, clung to the straps of my bras, and invaded the pores of the childhood blanket I've had since I was born (of all of these things, only the last brought me to tears.  The blanket is probably beyond human help.)  I have never, in my earthly life, seen or smelled so much mold.

I could blame the rainy season, but it's easier to blame acts of divine retribution.  Perhaps, in a previous life, i spoke ill of Gandhi.  Or something.  Anyway, I expected some sort of disaster when I returned, but the mold has left me stymied.

Since I returned from my vacation with a suitcase full of dirty clothes, I was stranded with the option of either wearing moldy pants or going commando to work tomorrow.  I took some of my clothes down to the local dry-cleaners to see if they could be saved.

"Can you remove this?" I asked, showing the clerk a pair of jeans that had gone from deep gray to phosphorescent green.  He touched the mold with a curious fingertip and an expression of profound disgust came over his face.  He ran to the sink in the counter and proceeded to thoroughly rinse his hand.

"I'll ask in the back," he choked out, and ran for his boss.  The boss appeared.  He surveyed my wrecked garments with a stern stomach and practiced eye.

"Yeah, it'll come out," he said.  And wrote me a bill for an amount so large I am frightened to reproduce it here.  (Using the ADB's PPP dollar-rupee conversion rate, he charged me $22 for six garments.  Ok, maybe it wasn't so large.)

I arrived at the office sweating and bedraggled, and told a friend about the situation.

"God, you have to move," she said, looking horrified.  Damn it.  I finally realize how Ramses felt, refusing to let the Israelites go.  (Okay, maybe not really.  But what plague is next?  Rats, heat, dust storms, mold.  What is left?  Dare I even tempt God by asking?)