Rescued by a cat that played role of ‘Pied Piper’ of Uswaz

You love stories. Don’t you? That is why I am hammering the keyboard to write one for you. As a nursery kid, before Miss Magari threw me out of class for peeping under her skirt, she told us one story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin that is significant in this rat and cockroach-infested Uswaz. The story was about a man who was hired to lure away rats with his sweet piped music to their demise.

The piper was successful in luring the rats into Weser River in the lower German Saxon except one.

Now, if your primary school teacher was so daft not to read the story to you, forgive me for not telling the whole of it – the space is limited.

You are however free to seek for your primary school teacher (if he/she is still living) for further storytelling sessions. Anyway, the rats were so huge that they became such a menace - they had cats for lunch and dogs for supper.

For sometimes now, my one-and-only woman Bisho Ntongo and I would have loved to hire the services of a man of his ilk to lure away the resident rats to some sewerage somewhere in this rat and roach infested Uswaz. This is because rats have become such a threat to everything in our two-roomed shack that they gnaw at everything including books, handbags, shoes, school and college certificates as well as plastics and metals. Rats have become an eyesore to me. I can now tell from the pack a pregnant, a lazy, a drunk or a happy one at a glimpse.

As we partake of meals, mixed aromas of food attract the brutes from their nooks and crannies. They come out, wink and smile at us as if to remind us of their unwelcome existence and then fade back to their nooks only to raise hell.

Recently, it rained cats and dogs and fortunately a kitten that could have fallen off the sky came knocking at the door. This was a relief since for once, we had something that could at least scare off the rats. The only real problem is that Bisho Ntongo still thinks that there is something satanic about the creature (cats are associated with witchcraft). My daughter on the other hand thinks that cat is a god-given substitute for dolls. Witchcraft or no witchcraft, I have ordered that the cat stays. I am hoping the cat will be strong enough to climb the walls to the ceiling. Its only problem is that it is convinced peeing on my bed is a good thing to do to Bisho Ntongo’s chagrin. In the meantime, the cat might end up serving the purpose of the Pied Piper of Hamlin.