OUR OLD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL...:

As India rises, its rat catchers toil in darkness (ERIKA KINETZ, 11/20/10, Associated Press)

India seems to exist in multiple historical epochs simultaneously — nowhere more starkly than here, amid the crumbling stone walls and old goat bones of the Sathe Nagar housing colony in a northern suburb of India's financial capital, Mumbai, formerly called Bombay.

One side of the neighborhood is edged by a high shining fence beyond which lies 21st century India: the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, the country's premier nuclear research facility.

On this side of the fence, people live in a vaguely medieval place where need outweighs hope and there is still talk of the plague.

To the south is a 50-acre slaughterhouse, one of the largest in Asia. To the north is a city dump.

In other words, rat heaven.

The alleyways between buildings are frothy with trash.

Look closer.

In the faint light of the windows, the ground is alive with rats. A twitching nose peeks from a crevice in the wall. A rat tail vanishes down a hole.

Sabid Sheikh waits.

The trick is to catch the rat's eye and shine a flashlight in its face. The rodent freezes like a deer in headlights.

Thwack!

If perfectly aimed, a single blow can kill a rat. But most do not surrender meekly.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

And so it goes until the rat lies windmilling its legs and expires in a final, furious shudder.

If the rat catcher's aim or courage fails, the rat may scurry into a hole or drain pipe, forcing the man to reach in, barehanded, and extract it by the tail.

If the rodent ventures too far in, the catcher may daub the end of his killing stick with rat's blood to lure it out.

Sheikh's favorite technique is to grab the rat by the tail and twirl it above his head like a whirligig before bashing its head against a wall. If it still doesn't die, he will grind its head into the ground with his heel.

By 1:30 a.m., Sheikh and two other rat catchers have packed 94 dead and dying rats into two bloodied sacks to be carted away in a rickshaw, counted by the city, and samplings taken to be tested for bubonic plague.

They smell so bad that the rickshaw driver pulls over and vomits.

__

Sheikh's youngest brother, Wasim, tagged along and killed a few rats too. He is about 14, and some months back his father made a cell phone video of him in action. There is young Wasim, dragging a rat as big as his forearm from a trap and smacking it to death. His mom giggles as she watches the video.

Such is the parents' pride, they could be watching their son playing the heroic lead in a school play.

"Now he's putting his hand in the burrow," the father said, beaming. "I'm never worried about disease. I have faith in God."

He sees himself as a public servant, ridding the city of vermin for the greater good of its citizens.

Besides, he had no choice.

At age 8, he set forth on a 36-hour train ride, alone, from his village to meet his father in Mumbai. Before boarding he went to a mosque. "I prayed to God for a job in Bombay," he said. "I prayed for money. I prayed for a settled life."

For 10 years he hawked peanuts and puffed rice to crowds at a commuter train station while his father did odd jobs, baking the flat bread called roti or collecting scrap metal.

They slept on footpaths.

One day a woman came up to Jahed Sheikh and asked if he wanted to work for the city.

"She changed my life by giving me that job I desperately needed," he said. "Now it's my kids' turn."

...had a designated rat catcher too. Well, if you call snagging the biggest kid at the school and giving him a hammer "rat-catching".

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Posted by Orrin Judd at January 6, 2011 7:22 AM