Can a mosquito
mosquito?
(The birth of the verb ‘to
mosquito’)
A
fly can fly but a mosquito cannot mosquito? Read on.
A
week back I was about to stun a mosquito.
‘Spare
me. I’ll give you an interview’, it pleaded.
Overcoming
my surprise, I asked,
‘How
do you find us, Mr.…?’
‘I
am a womosquito’ she said sternly.
‘Beg
your pardon’ I apologized.
‘We
womosquitos are ill fated like your women. Human
blood is our ordained food. But we seem to bring out the killer in you. You are
all killers. You choose different methods. Clinical killers stun and then kill.
Some gory killers smash and nonchalantly wipe off the blood on their hands.
Some are devious. They soap their hands and then catch us’ the mosquito said.
‘Very
bad’ I said to humor her.
‘Don’t
be smug! I know you. You clutter your room and invite us but keep cobwebs to
entrap us. I have seen you catch my best friend and feed her to the spider’ she
said.
‘Sorry.
I’ll make amends. I will send your viewpoint to WC. The world shall know you’, I
said.
After
the next WC issue came, the mosquito met me once more.
‘You’ve
done us in. Now mosquito has become an abuse. To mosquito now means to inflict
a mosquito story on somebody’ she wailed.
‘But
you mosquitoed me before I mosquitoed others’ I said.
The
enraged lady then bit me and stuck herself to a drop of amber.
She
had the last laugh as after a billion years, when dinosaurs had retaken the
earth, a dinosaur scientist found my blood in her and made a whole population
of my clones to keep for pets.
Swami Sampurnananda,