Tracking down a dead rat.

I return to Chennai from my weekend at Kerala and as I open the door to my flat, the first
thing that hits me is a real bad stench - something like a dead rat. I panic and it is not just because a dead rat is somewhere inside, fouling up the whole place with bad odour. It is also because a rat in your home is not good news - before you know what hit you, it would have chewed through your books, documents, clothes etc.

Or in my case, those stack of diaries that I maintain from my schooldays - a kind of daily
blog on actual paper, which my wife sarcastically calls the "Sugar diaries", given that most
of the posts are about girls I had crushes on in school/college. I am sure nothing would make
her more happy than knowing that a rat has chewed these diaries beyond recognition. :-)

Anyway, I try to look (actually smell) the source of the bad odour, but cannot trace it. I look
at obvious places like under the sofa, behind the book rack etc, but still no luck. Since I have
to rush to work, I leave it at that for the moment.

Again, at night when I return home, the same stench prevails in the room. I am now quite irritated, mainly due to having failed in finding the source of the odour. I open the balcony
door to let in some fresh air which would hopefully dilute the odour in the room. Since the
stench appears to be coming from somewhere in the drawing room (no trace of the odour
in the kitchen or the two bedrooms), I decide to do a thorough clean-up of the drawing room.

I have to track the source down somehow & eliminate it because I am having friends coming over the next day. Determined to trace the source, I go about cleaning up the drawing room, which was anyway long overdue. I go over the whole room carefully, but still no sign of any
dead rat or even a dead cockroach.

The stench still pervades the room & I am getting both irritated and angry and also feeling
sleepy. Since I have anyway cleaned the drawing room, I decide to complete it by clearing
the dining table also, which was choc-a-bloc with glasses from a session last week with friends.

I move the glasses to the kitchen sink, wipe the table clean and am about to call it a day,
when I see a small container on the table, covered with a little saucer. I open it to see some
curd that has gone really bad - had left it by mistake outside the fridge for 3 days, which
was enough to make it smell as bad as a dead rat. :-(

Pour it immediately down the sink and rinse the container many times so that any trace
of the awful stench is gone. Now the flat is getting back to normalcy and I am doubly glad
that I could not only trace the source of the odour, but that it also did not happen to be a
rat-attack, which means the Sugar Diaries are safe in the cabinet. :-)