Saagar kinare

“I don’t understand, how can there be lizards in an air-conditioned room?” sobbed mom, surveying her environs in despair.

Barely 10 minutes into their vacation at The Dune, mom spotted her first lizard sunning itself on the bathroom window. “Somebody, shoo it out for me, please!” she pleaded, panic rising in her voice.

Dad sighed resignedly and threw himself on the bed.

“Ma, there are lizards at home also,” offered the children helpfully. “Can we go to the pool now?”

Wowed by the hotel Web site, mom had decided to spend their first vacation in India at the eco-beach resort, opting for an air-conditioned room for the sole purpose of warding off unwelcome visitors.

Perhaps the half-dozen French tourists at the hotel might have found the setting charming and bucolic, but mom could not relax with a lizard in the room. All the warm and fuzzy feelings she had when she spotted the geese and turkeys meandering around the property, the four resident dogs lolling near the swimming pool, the brown-eyed calves in the cow shed and the velvety rabbits nibbling on carrots next to the organic garden, vanished in a trice as she frantically dialed the reception.

“There’s a huge lizard in my room! Please send somebody,” she gasped.

A Nepali lad showed up a few minutes later, broom in hand. Mom pointed him toward the bathroom. He shut himself in for five minutes, gabbed on his cell phone, and emerged to report, “Chala gaya.”

Later that night, as she rinsed beach sand off her body, mom found that “chala gaya” meant the lizard had found temporary refuge behind the shower curtain. She ran out of the bathroom screaming, only to find her children pointing with glee to a brown lizard relaxing on the ceiling.

“The lizard’s baby just went behind the curtain,” they told her.

Mom speed dialed the reception again. “There are more lizards in my room!”

Nepali boy made a cursory appearance and made a great show of shaking out the drapes and running his broom along the wall. “Chala gaya,” he replied again, much to mom’s rising irritation. Barely had she shut the door behind him when the lizards reemerged from their hiding place and chased each other around the drapes mimicking Rajesh Khanna and La Tagore singing Gunguna rahe hain pardeh ....

Mom spent the night cowering on the edge of the bed and listened to the lizards loudly call out to each other while the rest of the family slept soundly.

“Remember Cairns?” she asked dad the next morning. The humans had traveled to Australia a few years ago only to discover that lizards had preceded them at The Great Barrier Reef by a few million years.

What was supposed to be an exotic experience with a view of the sea was marred by the presence of a black gecko behind the four-poster bed in their room. The idiot receptionist had smirked at mom when she mentioned the extra guest in their room. “They’re harmless,” he said, not knowing that mom would rather share her space with a tigress and her cubs.

Despite the sweltering Puducherry heat, mom was determined to spend as much time as possible outside the hotel room. She rose early to head to the beach and promptly showed up for the lavish breakfast buffet each morning. As the children biked around the 30 acres and gamboled with the dogs, mom burned to a crisp under the relentless sun by studiously following them and sitting patiently by the pool sipping hot tea laced with cane sugar, a tubby Labrador for company.

The staff was unfailingly polite and did not expect tips, the surroundings (minus the crawlies) were breathtaking, the food fattening and delicious, and the resident dogs a veritable delight.

“Can we live here forever?” asked Kuki, building a sand castle on the beach. “I don’t want to go back to India.”

“Duh, Kuki, this is India,” corrected her brother.

“I wanna live here in the hotel like Zack and Cody and play with the doggies,” she said. “Please, mom, can we?”

That same morning, mom had found lizard droppings beside her toothbrush on the bathroom counter. When she conveyed her disgust to dad, he rolled his eyes and said, “Stop acting like this! There are lizards all over the world, OK?”

“Not in Canada and Europe,” replied mom defiantly.

“If we go there, you’ll complain about the cold,” said dad irritably.

“I just want to go to a warm place with no lizards, that’s all,” responded mom peevishly. “That’s not unreasonable.”

“I told you, there are lizards everywhere!” said dad, stomping out of the room.

Somebody, please tell me he’s wrong.