Lizzie, a true story

KL entered the household because she liked me. I say this with confidence because she was not there when I moved in, making her appearance only some days later. Friends have confirmed, although their motives are not entirely above suspicion, that I am the sort to whom lizards can become attached.

KL was of the non-interfering kind. Other females who came into my kitchenette would try to dictate what should go into which dish. They were, generally speaking, a pain in the behind. KL was quite unlike them. She was content to look on benignly and let me get on with my business. It is not that she did not help: She meticulously cleaned up the fragments of meat and other substances which I spilled in the course of my sometimes overly energetic cooking.

A little over seven years ago I moved to Peacock Meadow. This is the name I like to use because it makes the place sound like a quiet hamlet in Suffolk inhabited by bankers and their large motor cars. The natives, however, do not care for elegance: they still call it Mayur Vihar. The flat in which I live belongs to my mother, who has a quite unreasoning anti-lizard outlook on life. When I broached the subject of introducing a lizard into the kitchen, my mother put her foot down. She did that very firmly, as I noticed, since a foot of my own happened to be where she put hers down.

What was I to do? I soon observed that my mother never entered the loo attached to the room allotted to me because there are two considerably larger ones in the flat. In a development of the “made in heaven” kind, a lizard also noticed this and moved into the loo aforesaid. In that chamber, we get to meet often because I drink a great deal of chai and sit under the tap several times a day in the hot weather.

There is a marked resemblance between LL and KL, and one of these days I propose to ask if there is a family connection. I have to learn the language first, though, and hope to find a course advertised on the Internet. If I am lucky, one of my dozens of spammer friends will tell me of just such a course, which may well cover the chameleon and monitor dialects, too, though for a small extra charge.