“Mumma!!! Papa!!! Cockroach!!” Four-year-old Ved came running into the living room from the bathroom with only a T-shirt on. He had recently learned to poop independently, and so when he saw a big cockroach for the first time in his life, he ran straight towards his mumma and papa to share the experience with them — forgetting that he had entered the bathroom to do his business.
His father Raj and his mother Nivedita looked at each other and smiled. Their hearts filled with love for young Ved and his innocent antics.
“Papa, come quick, big cockroach.” Ved held Raj’s finger and pulled him towards the bathroom. “Papa, we must kill it.”
Raj stood up from the chair with a big smile on his face. Ved led the way and Raj followed that cute little human creature into their bathroom.
The bathroom was clean, dry, and white. The floor tiles and the wall tiles matched in a shade of white that made it look expensive and spacious. And right at the center of it all was the red coloured cockroach.
“Papa!! Cockroach!! This is the one!!!” Ved pointed at the red thing and squatted on the floor of the bathroom, directly above the red pest.
“Yes, yes, beta. Yes. Come on, let’s move back. Papa will make it go away.” Raj held Ved’s arms and guided him outside the bathroom.
“You watch from here only, okay?” Raj instructed Ved.
“Papa, what will you do with it?
Would you kill it?” Ved innocently asked.
“No beta, we should not kill animals or insects unless they are harming us,” Raj explained, looking for the wiper in the washroom.
When he found the wiper, instead of hitting the 3-inch, long-legged, two-antennaed pest, Raj decided to push the cockroach back into the drain pipe from where it had come.
With the slightest touch of the wiper, the cockroach scrambled for safety. It ran away from the drain pipe, and Raj quickly blocked its way, gently nudging it back in the right direction. Then it changed course, still drifting the wrong way, and Raj interjected once more. This continued three to four times before the roach finally slipped back into the drain pipe to safety.
Ved jumped with joy at every run of the roach and every sudden change of movement from Raj.
Inside the drain the cockroach heaved a sigh of relief as soon as it moved out of Raj’s reach.
“Phew!!! That was close.” The roach thanked his stars that he was still alive and unharmed, and that he could go back to his safe house in the bathroom drain.
“Are you OK?”
“Did he hurt you?”
“How were you able to make it back?”
Ten more cockroaches had surrounded Miko, the roach who had escaped a human alive.
“How many times have I told you not to go beyond the drain pipe?” Miko’s family gathered around him under the drain lid of Raj’s bathroom.
Miko’s mother was particularly disturbed by Miko’s habit of wandering into the human domain, especially into a well-lit place.
“How many times have I told you that there is no food on this side of the house?” Miko’s mother reprimanded him.
“Mom…aoo….that hurt. I was not here for food and you know that.” Miko rubbed the spot where his mom had hit him.
“I know, baby. But these are human beings. They are evil. No good has ever come from knowing more about them. It is very dangerous to go out there like this. You could have gotten yourself killed.”
“But mama look – I am alive. And you know what? That man could have killed me if he wanted to, but he didn’t. In fact, I think he helped me reach the drain.” Miko explained.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when I saw the human, I started running, but I was terrified and I could not make out which way to go. So I ran in the wrong direction. And he helped me go the right way by literally directing me. If he wanted, he could have killed me but he did not.”
“Oh Miko, my baby, how can I explain to you what humans are?” Miko’s mom rubbed her antennae against his.
That night, the drain stayed unusually quiet. Miko lay awake, replaying the human’s face — calm, gentle, nothing like the monsters his family feared.
The next morning, life had returned to normal, and Ved was in the bathroom again—this time for his usual bath.
“Mom, did you see that cockroach? It was so big. It was right here, where we are sitting. He saw Papa and it started running.” Ved chuckled, sitting in that little yellow bathtub.
“Baby, cockroaches are not good. We should stay away from them,” Ved’s mom tried explaining to him.
“You should have killed it yesterday itself. You know how dangerous they are. We have two kids at home.” Nivedita was now speaking to Raj as he entered the bathroom to pick up Ved from the bathtub and dry him.
“I know, I know, but I just couldn’t make myself do it. It was a single roach. Why kill it when I can just direct it into the pipe?”
In the drain below, Shana heard the humans talking. Their fear travelled through the pipes just like the water — cold, sharp, & impossible to ignore.
“He is different, you know that,” Ramil said quietly, watching Shana’s face.
Miko’s mother only murmured, “Hmm,” her mind still trapped in the fright of last night — her son slipping out of death’s reach by a whisker.
“He doesn’t function like the rest of us,” Ramil continued. “He thinks. He feels. His instincts don’t begin and end with food or hunger. He is…empathetic. Curious. Remember the time when he got swept by the water in the big drain?”
Shana let out a small laugh at the memory, the fear softening for a moment.
“Yes, all of us had told him not to leave my side! But he had to see that shiny thing lying near the edge” she said, smiling with unbearable love for her son and a worried gleam in her eyes. Worry that her child might not be ready for this harsh world he was living in.
Ramil nodded, warming to the recollection
“And the night we raided that kitchen? Everyone else ran back the moment the humans started returning, but he stayed behind. ‘I wanted to look at the fat chef who sleeps on the floor,’ he told us later. ‘I want to know what that noise coming out of his mouth is.’”
They both laughed — a soft, shared laughter — sinking into memories of a child who was too naïve, too tender, and far too curious for the dangerous world he was born into.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
“Papa, where is the cockroach?” Ved asked his father, while his father was helping him poop.
“Baby, he has gone home,” Raj responded.
“Will he come back?”
“Probably not, darling. You see, cockroaches live in the drains — in dark spaces. They don’t prefer light.”
“But once we saw one of them.”
“Yes, sweetheart, we saw. But it came out when it was dark. We saw it now only because we turned on the light.”
“Yes Papa, it was running so fast to take cover. Papa, Mumma says we should kill any cockroaches. They are dirty, they bring illness. If they are there we will get sick.” Ved echoed.
“They are dirty, that’s right. If you touch anything they touch, our hands get dirty, and if we eat with those hands without washing, we get sick. So Mumma is right. But it is also a living being, and we should not kill them unless we have to.”
“Is that why you shooed him away towards the drain?”
“Yes beta. I did not want to hurt it.”
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
“See, Taro… did you hear what he said? I told you — he’s not like the others.”
“I told you he didn’t try to kill me the other day, no matter what all of you were saying.” Miko was listening to the conversation between Ved and his father from inside the drain, along with his brother, Taro.
“He is a human being, Miko. They always kill. They can never be trusted,” Taro shot back, taking a bite from yesterday’s drain muck.
“I’m telling you, this one is different.”
And without any warning, Miko popped his head out of the drain lid and walked straight towards Ved.
“Papa! Cockroach!” Ved shrieked as soon as he saw Miko and jumped back, completely taken by surprise.
“Hi, I am Miko. I am here to…” Miko began.
But before he could say another word, Raj had already grabbed the wiper and started pushing the cockroach again. And just like the last time, Miko scrambled left and right three or four times before finding the right direction and slipping back into the drain.
As soon as he came back inside, Taro exploded.
“Are you mad? You gave me a heart attack! Going out in the dark is one thing, but going out in broad daylight? You could have gotten yourself killed!”
“He did not hurt me. Again. All he had to do was step on me — I would have been a paste flattened on the ground. Taro, did you see that?”
“Yes, I saw. I still can’t believe you did that. He really didn’t hurt you. When he picked up the wiper, I froze. I was petrified. I thought you were dead. But look at you — alive in front of me! Whoooo!” Taro grabbed Miko by his front legs and swirled him around in a big circle.
He couldn’t believe his eyes. For the first time ever, he had seen a human being who saw a cockroach and also didn’t kill it.
“Stop! Stop!” Miko said, laughing and dizzy, and Taro gently put him down.
“Now you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Imagine what this means. We could roam around the bathroom freely. We could see and feel for ourselves what everything is.” Miko’s mind raced with possibilities.
“Yes! For example — that pink thing the humans rub on their bodies with water… the one that makes bubbles…” Taro said, his eyes lighting up. “I want to try that.”
“Or that white bottle with a rose on top, which humans press to get that white substance on their hands,” Miko chirped, excitement leaking through his voice.
Then he paused and looked at Taro again.
“Taro… I have an idea. Do you also—”
At that very instant, something inside Taro shifted. His face froze. His eyes widened with a fear that came from a deeper place — as if a truth had suddenly hit him.
“What happened, Taro? Are you okay?” Miko asked, concern filling his eyes.
“Miko… I just had a realization. Human beings can never be trusted. They will always kill. They are vile and hateful. Anything that does not fit into their idea of the world — they destroy it.”
Taro moved closer and held Miko’s face gently in his tiny hands.
“Miko, it’s not worth it. You will get yourself killed. Nothing is more important than life.”
With that, Taro let go of him, turned around, and walked back toward the left tunnel.
And on the surface above, Ved had his own realization.
“Papa, what happens when somebody dies?”
Raj was reading a book and Ved was playing with his toys when Ved suddenly asked this innocent, curious question.
“Beta, when a human being dies, his soul leaves his body and goes to God.” Raj closed his book and looked straight at Ved.
“And what about animals and insects? What happens to them when they die?”
“Well, their soul also leaves their body and goes to God.”
“Is the soul the same for everyone?” Ved now looked at Raj, listening with full attention.
Raj thought for a second and then answered.
“Beta, every living being has a soul and while all the living beings are different their souls come from one place. God. So yes all the souls are the same even though they might look different.” Raj pulled Ved’s cute little cheek out of pure love.
“Papa,” Ved stood up. “If all souls are the same, then why do we kill animals and insects?”
“Who told you that we kill insects?” Raj asked gently.
“Mumma told me we should kill cockroaches. Papa, if the soul of all cockroaches is the same as human beings, then isn’t killing cockroaches bad?”
“Yes beta, we should not kill living beings. I try to not do that. But sometimes there comes a time when there is nothing much we can do.”
“Does this mean that next time you will kill the cockroach if you get a chance?” Ved asked with a slight tremble in his voice.
“No baby. Papa would never do that,” Raj pulled Ved into his embrace and hugged him.
Above the drain, a child wondered about souls. Below it, another child — smaller, stranger, but no less alive — also wondered.
“Mom, do you also think that I’m strange?” Miko asked Shana.
“What? Where did that come from? You are my child. I would never think that. I mean, you are different,” she paused, “ and naive and curious… but you are not weird.”
“How am I different, mother?”
His mother let out a huge sigh & twitched her antennae & with all the love & warmth a mother could conjure, spoke.
“Miko, look around you. Look at the world you are born in. It’s damp, dark & murky. We eat stolen rotten food, we hide in drains, our world is driven by hunger. By our stomach. But you, you are different. You think. You feel. And you are curious. That’s how you are different.”
“But is being curious bad?”
“Yes. If you are your size. Look how big those humans are. All it would take them to stomp you to death is one second. Yet you want to be friends with them. Beta they are not somebody that can be trusted.”
“Ma, I have been up there with that man. Not once but twice. He could have killed me in exactly the same way you just explained. But he chose not to. On both the occasions. That has to mean something, right?”
“That could be one man out of a million, Miko.”
“Yes, that is what I am saying. All I need is to be friends with just one man and not a million. I need to know about him, know him, and he has proven to me that he doesn’t harm.”
“Miko, I am not sure if you understand the gravity of what you are saying. Do you know that humans have developed poison that kills us? I think you have forgotten why we left the last drain.”
“I haven’t, ma.”
“Yes, you have, Miko. Remember the feeling when that man sprayed that poison in our drain.
Remember how you lost all your brothers & sisters except for Taro?
Remember how we ran, just in the nick of time, to save ourselves?”
Miko became quiet. He contemplated for some time, as if remembering the horrific visuals of a massacre — of his family.
He came back to the present & moved closer to his mother, & rubbed her antennas with his.
“Ma, I remember every single second of that day. But it is also true that this man chose not to kill me. I remember that too.”
“Ma, I know that cockroaches here think that I am mad. But ma, I can prove it to you. Come with me to meet the human & I will show you that we can be friends.”
Shana hesitated, torn between fear and her son’s stubborn hope.
For the first time, she let herself imagine it — a world where a human and a roach could meet without death in between.
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Raj was helping his wife in the kitchen when Ved came running, calling out for his papa.
“Papa, there are two cockroaches in the bathroom!”
Raj exchanged looks with his wife.
“I told you to kill that cockroach. Now look, there are two.” Raj’s wife followed him as he went to check.
When they entered the bathroom, two red pests were staring up at them.
“Hi, I am Miko, and this is my mother,” he began to say.
“You have to do something about them.” Raj’s wife sternly told him.
“No, no, you’re getting us wrong. We’re here to be your friends. We want to know you.” Miko explained
Raj quickly stepped out of the bathroom while Ved waited at the door, expecting Raj to bring back the wiper to shoo the cockroaches away like always. But this time Raj came back with a bottle of cockroach repellent.
“Miko, run!” Shana shouted as soon as she saw the bottle.
But it was already too late.
Raj sprayed the repellent on both cockroaches, and within seconds, both of them lay dead on the white neat, clean ,and dry bathroom floor.
