A gecko on my shirt, a monkey in the dining hall, and a lizard in my toilet

A pair of pigeons keeps trying to make a nest on my windowsill. They’ve actually succeeded several times, and I have to knock it down, eggs and all. Knocking down the eggs makes me feel guilty, so I try to get rid of the nest before any are laid. Yesterday morning I opened the window to do just that. As I was pushing off the last few twigs, a gecko leapt onto my shirt. I’m not afraid of geckos, which are everywhere in India, but the surprise of it made me start writhing and shaking to try to knock it off. After a couple seconds it fell down onto the floor. It was about six or seven inches long from head to tail, and was a typical gecko like any of the others that come in my room to eat moths or bugs, and leave roughly one capsule-sized black turd on my floor per day. I smiled when I saw that it was nothing to be afraid of.

“Listen, gecko,” I said, “I don’t care if you want to come into my room, but don’t jump on my shirt!” It scampered away under my desk.

I then left for breakfast in the campus dining hall. I was enjoying my tea when I looked up to see a large langour monkey enter the building from the stairs leading to the roof. He must have gotten onto the roof from a nearby tree. “Oh my god,” I said, “a freaking monkey!” Languors are not dangerous, and are actually used in some cities (such as Delhi) to repel the smaller, more malicious macaques. I’ve seen many langours around India before, but this was the first time one had come into the dining hall.

Someone made a noise to scare the monkey back onto the roof, but it didn’t budge. I got up and yelled at it, but that didn’t help either. One of the guys who works in the kitchen ran up the stairs and chased it away with a stick, and then closed the door so it wouldn’t be able to get back in.

I left the dining hall smiling. I’ve always been partial to monkeys.

In the evening, I went to my room to use the toilet. Upon opening the lid, I saw that a lizard—several inches longer than the gecko, with a spiny back, a long, thin tail, and a small piece of toilet paper crowning his head—had somehow gotten inside. How he’d managed to get in I don’t know, because the lid had been on since morning. He was finding it difficult to get out, because the bowl was too slippery for his little feet to grasp.

I closed the lid, left my room, and used a communal toilet instead. I then went to the library, checked the dictionary for the Gujarati word for lizard, and told the librarian and the man in charge of discipline about the kanchindo in my toilet. The librarian laughed, but the disciplinarian was stern.

“Who is better,” he asked me in Gujarati, “David or kanchindo?”

I saw his point. I went back to my room, and used my toilet brush to shift the lizard from the bowl onto a flat piece of wood. The lizard was very antsy, but it wasn’t able to climb off because of the way it had grasped the wood. I dumped it onto the ground outside.

Then I went back to the library to find the disciplinarian. “Kanchindo toilet out,” I told him in awful Gujarati. “Kanchindo better not. David better!” He nodded in approval.