Rats to Ritches

The thing about rats, they say is ... they are just like rats. They live with you, they eat your food, they make tunnels all around you, they bring in their friends through those tunnels when you are unaware, to come in and eat your food some more, they dig the earth under your feet, they make your walls hollow, they keep doing this until you're broke and when the walls are about to collapse, they leave you and run. And all this while, mind this, they never reveal themselves.

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***

I lived in the same house Semi lived. Of course, it wasn't his real name, Semi. It was just something I liked to call him. You see, he was very thin. His hands and his feet were half that of a normal man, his cheeks were sunken, and you could tell his eyes apart from the sockets. He didn't eat much, he almost lived off the scraps that he found in the fridge. This is not to say that he didn't have the means to feed himself, it was just that he didn't like to go out much. And it wasn't, that he didn't like people very much. In fact, he looked happier when he was in a crowd. He liked the girls and liked drinking once in a while and having fun. But he never made any friends, and he never let others to try and be cozy with him. He was too morose for that.

He stayed high most of the time, with weed, heroin, liquid whitener and what not. And in between staying high and asleep, he smoked. He would light a new cigarette before the one in his hand ended and would stand by the rocking chair, looking out of the glass wall of our house, on to the street. I keep saying house all this time, although technically, it wasn't a house, it was an apartment, a studio apartment. It stood on the posh Dragrich Street, at the tenth floor of an expensive high rise super luxurious apartment building.

There wasn't anybody else in the house apart from me and Semi. Nobody ever visited the place, except for some of my friends once in a while, who I only called when he was deep asleep or not in the house. There were reasons for that. First, he didn't like strangers visiting where he lived and wasn't too inclined to make friends out of them. Like I said, he was rude and reclusive in that respect. Second, being honest, I didn't want my friends to see him when he was awake and out of his bed. I had tried asking him the reason for such hermit like behavior, but each time he would narrate some incident in the most cynical manner about how life is so harsh and sardonic. Like this one time, he told me that when he was six, his mother went out of the shack they lived in under the overpass to get some food, and never returned.

***

One day, I was going through the drawers, searching for something, when I accidentally clicked open a false base in the bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet. Two small diaries were hidden beneath it. One contained the details of Semi's many bank accounts & lockers and other apparently confidential details about his company and dead partners. The other diary, was full from end to end with random names and numbers. They weren't to make sense at first, but nonetheless, they were as important as the details in the other diary or he wouldn't have hidden it there in the first place. Since Semi had never mentioned about such a diary or closet to me before, I didn't mention too, when he came home that day.

It wouldn't take no scientist's brain to figure out that one cannot go from waiting for food in an under-the-flyover shack to sniffing glue in a swank studio apartment by making cookie cutters in a suburb factory. Cause mind you, he never went to college, nor did he ever win a lottery. And somehow, the words import-export and metal confectionery frames never went down my throat without an urge to throw up all over his face. Something was very shady about an import export business, where two business partners died unnatural deaths and the last, our own Semi, was left with so much money he could never count, even with his deserting mama and ditching girlfriend and envious friends by his side. He once had envious friends. But then, he had friends. 

I wasn't always his friend, if you'd call it that. In fact, I didn't even know him until a few months ago. One night, on one of his outings to the bar, he drank too much. And while he was crossing the road nearby on his way back, he got hit by a speeding car and lay there, bleeding and unconscious. I happened to be passing that empty street when I saw him. I called the ambulance and went with him to the hospital. I even spent the night there. When he became conscious and learned the whole thing, he was too grateful and wanted to thank me for it. And when I told him how I was new in the city and living in a rented flat in the old town, he insisted that I come and live with him. For all, I had just saved his life. I think that was the reason he made an exception in his no friends rule. An exception for me.

***  

I worked as a freelancing interior consultant. And ever since the depression, austerity was the word about home decorations. I stayed at home more and as I noticed, Semi's condition worsened over time. He had become extremely frail and he was in a constant phase of hysteria and fear whenever he wasn't high. He had started taking stronger drugs to forget his fears, but he never told me what he was so frightened about.   Then there came a time when he stopped going out completely. He would often draw up the curtains and peep through the hem out on the streets. On the third day of doing this, he told me that there were men standing on the other side of the road, and that they look suspicious and dangerous.

Semi hid a lot of things from me, told me stories half-true, and never quiet trusted me completely. But that, I came to know, had more to do with his natural behavior that he developed over time. So, I hid some things from him too, apart from the fact that I've found his diaries. I knew that he and his business partners once had an understanding with the drug dealers in the city. They used to haul their stuff in their cookie cutter containers they shipped in and out of the city. And, that when the drug mafia came to know that he and his partners have been collecting their names and confidential details, just in case, they killed his two partners. And when he heard about this while he was abroad, he gathered up the money and the details and went into hiding, forever.

But now men were standing across the street. And that day, when I saw him rummaging around the kitchen cabinets, I knew the time has come. I was talking to a friend on the phone when he came to the hall completely deranged. His face had become astonishingly red and he was blabbering something and both of his hands were on his head like he was about pull his hair out. Somebody had stolen all his money from all of his bank accounts. He didn't have a penny left. I sat there, calm, and watched him think aloud over how could this happen to him, about who could do this to him. He never let anybody come close to him. Still never, for once, did he consider my name in his wildest of dreams. Then the bell rang and I said that my friends must have arrived while I went to open the door. He didn't get much time to react over why I called my friends that day, because when he saw my friends, he was aghast. Three or four men with guns had come in. 

All I said after picking up my bag from my bed-area and before going out was, Sorry man, nothing personal. I was just doing my job.
And all he said before I went out, leaving him to his fate was, You Rat!

 ***

The thing about rats is, that the're just like me. I could have told Semi that I invited my friends to search around his apartment when he wasn't home, that when I was searching something in the drawers, the thing I was searching for, was 'the thing' I found that day. I could've told him that I was the one who poisoned him slowly through the scraps he ate, that I was the one who made him move to stronger drugs and make his life hell. I could've told him that I was the one who told my friends to stand across the street to frighten him. Or I could've told him that it was my idea to get him hit by a car when he came out of the bar that night and that it was all, all, part of the plan. 
But then, would have all this helped him? Changed his fate?