Lord Have Mercy! Catholic Mosquitoes in Bangalore

I’ve learned one interesting fact about mosquitoes this past month. It surprised me. Only female mosquitoes bite.

The point is not to make a case for what this says about females in general (pointing out generalizations in females is a topic I learned to avoid altogether many years ago), its all to say that I’m learning about mosquitoes because they are playing an increasingly important role in my life.

This may have started in 5th grade when I used a mosquito net for the first time and found it remarkably effective in protecting me from those mammoth beasts of New Hampshire. Or maybe its my friend Jeff and his doctoral work with mosquito genetics. Or at the very least the insufferable swarms that camp out at home during the summer in Va Beach. All said, I’ve made no friends of these bugs. I find them ruthless and senseless and have no issue giving them the squash. But in the land of karma, one could say that I just got bit…bad…

St Joseph’s college in Bangalore is a great spot. In fact, its one of the top 10 colleges in the country and I feel honored to be in residence here for two weeks delivering a course with my colleagues. But top colleges in India don’t look like the Swarthmores and Princetons of the US. This one looks great on the outside, but the inside is meager and my boarding space in the hostel is spartan. In fact, its meant to be a leg up (as I am a guest in the hostel). My friend Martin and I share a 10’x10’ space with a bathroom. It’s not bad for my standards, so we crashed in on Sunday night when we arrived. The few swirling mosquitoes seemed no problem.

Now I’d spent the last week hearing about malaria and anti-malaria medications and methods. Given my areas of travel, I decided on taking the “low-risk” of infection to the somewhat toxic anti-malaria drugs. But I did grab a mosquito net to bugger off anything that might come my way. Not surprisingly and to my subsequent regret, I was exhausted when I arrived into town, so I took one look at my bed and crashcd out.

It’s kind of hard to explain what happened to my face overnight. I actually didn’t even know until about midday Monday. I took one look in the mirror around lunchtime and noticed that my entire forehead was covered in red spots. It looked like a five year old had just learned how to make dots, found a red marker and used my head to test it out. I tried to look at it from every angle to see if it was as bad as I thought. It was and while the blankets had spared my body from the neck down, my friend Cheng confirmed that I received about 100 bites overnight. Somewhere between the thought and the actuality of that fact, I felt woozy. It didn’t help when I read back-to-back news articles, one about the rat fever currently in post-monsoon Bangalore, as well as the dangerously big packs of stray dogs in some sectors of town. Surely, I’d contacted some disease overnight – impossibly not. All these thoughts just in time for me to deliver the opening presentation at the college!

Despite the weakness, we delivered a crack workshop and I soon set to work on my battle plans for the evening showdown. Amazingly, I had my first experience in understanding excessive defense spending. When you’ve been burned and you think you got a method to deliver the knockout blow, you spend accordingly. Knowing that I couldn’t take another 10 bites, much less another hundred, I manifested my three-fold plan. First, seal all windows and doors and use a mosquito coil to smoke ‘em out. Second, acquire repellant and cover forehead vigorously with the highest DEET formula available (turned out to be high-quality Australian Bush DEET). And third, gerry-rig the mosquito net for ultimo protection. It took about 30 minutes to get everything right and I set off to bed feeling secure in my measures.

Amazingly, the plan worked to perfection. I woke up in the morning with my forehead still spattered like a Jackson Pollock painting, but no worse than the day before. I took my spotted forehead and headed out into a new morning.