Friendly Rats and MMA Fights in Sri Lanka (In Our Kitchen).

In this case, the MMA stands for Mad Mongoose Attacks (obviously).

A completely true, unembellished story, exactly as it happened before breakfast today:

We have an open air kitchen at our house in Weligama. It is surrounded by walls, about eight feet high, and part of it (the part over the sink and hotplate are roofed (with what appears to be a sieve mostly). I like the kitchen this way, except when it rains really hard (which it does every day, if only for a short while, or, well, sometimes all day), at which point the sieve (roof) starts to drizzle water all over everything in the kitchen. It can make cooking dinner a challenge some days (you set out to make sesame seared ahi steaks and you end up with fish soup).

This we get used to, just as we get used to our pet rat that eats everything left out on the kitchen counter. We named him Ratty McRatsalot. You can’t exactly keep a rat out of a kitchen that has an open roof over half of it, and a big rat-sized drain pipe in the floor that channels all the rain water back outside where it belongs. He has pretty easy access to the kitchen, so we just accept him as part of the family now. He hangs out under the refrigerator generally, but, like the begrudgingly accepted weird cousin that hangs around at family gatherings, we see him now and then. We just keep all the food in the house. Or in the refrigerator. Occasionally we forget an avocado (a special favorite for Ratty McRatsalot) or a banana out there, and we find them macerated by little rat teeth, surrounded by remnants of the skins (and rat poop) all over the counter in the morning.

This morning, with no sign of Ratty McRatsalot, I was making our fruit and curd bowls for breakfast, relaxing generally, daydreaming about the day’s upcoming surf session.

Oh, at this point I should add that we have a lot of cat fights around here (or at least we have assumed they are cat fights. They sound like it).

Anyways, onward…

This morning, while cutting mangoes, bananas, and passionfruit into bowls, I heard what sounded like the beginning of a cat fight in the back yard. No big thing. They are quite common, on the roof, in the attic, or in the yard (sometimes in the tuk tuk).

So back to cutting fruit, when suddenly, over the wall, eight feet down onto the kitchen floor comes a screeching, twisting, writhing, biting ball of brown (or ruddy red) fur. It goes like this: First, I drop everything I am doing for breakfast and try to restart my heart. That accomplished, I realize that there are two really large ruddy mongooses (mongeese maybe?) having the fight of their lives within five feet of me, and the door to the yard is closed and latched, and the door to the house (yeah, the one that sticks shut all the time) is also closed.

I was cornered.

The fight went on long enough (maybe ten seconds) for me to see that Mighty Max the Mongoose was getting the better of Rowdy Ruddy Rodney physically, but Rodney might have outdone Max in the sheer volume of ineffectual ear-splitting screeching.

Rodney must have realized the same thing, that all his best efforts at screeching his way out of an ass kicking was never going to win him the match, so he made a break for it.

Right the fuck at me.

I think he may have been eyeing Ratty McRatsalot’s drain pipe as a possible escape route, but stopped, recalculated the size of the pipe minus his girth, came up with a negative number, and started running again.

Right the fuck at me again.

I very clearly saw the look on his cute little weaselly face that said “You are currently between me and my only means of escape from this psychopath Max the Mongoose, and I will go under you, over you, or through you to get away”. Who was I to argue? These adorable furry little demons kill King cobras and eat them, so who or what am I in this equation?

A complete coward, as it turns out. I made some unintelligible screeching noises of my own and made it through the door into the house just in time (in time to not pee myself, mostly), as Tam came out of the bedroom (naked) to see what was all the fuss. I found myself distracted for a few seconds (I did say she was naked) before I noticed that it had quieted down in the kitchen.

Not a screech.

Not a peep.

So I sneaked open the kitchen door, which let loose with its own stealthy screeching as it came unstuck from the tile floor, and peeked out into the now vacant room. Nothing. The two combatants had disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. The only way that I can imagine them leaving is over the eight foot tall wall at the end of the room.

Or, did they?

Are they now living under the fridge with Ratty McRatsalot? Are they lurking in the cabinet, under the soup pan, ready to leap out the next time we decide on broth for dinner? Or, did they levitate themselves out of the kitchen, up a sheer eight foot tall wall? Rowdy Ruddy Rodney seemed scared enough to do it, so…

At least we don’t have to worry about King cobras in the back yard.

Or in the kitchen…