Mosquito Memories

Its not every day that extra-large mosquitoes make news and trigger nostalgia. There is a thunderstorm outside and when the monsoons set in back home. To complete the picture, I have a Lata Mangeshkar CD playing in the background and dinner is all the way Bengali - just the way J likes it.

Anyways, "super-mosquitoes" don't impress me much. I've grown up seeing much better than what they only now have in Athens. They should get some researchers over to the Kolkata suburb where my grandparents once lived. If memory serves right, the mosquitoes were about as large as bees and noisier. After each monsoon, they seemed to mutate to become even more vicious and virulent. Children did their homework sitting under a mosquito net - this was before the mosquito coils became popular.

We as a people have a thing for mosquitoes - we have seen their teeming millions up close and personal.

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