A Mouse in My House

Last weekend.
I was in kitchen. Suddenly I saw a small mouse running around.
I knew that he roamed around freely in our house. But since he was not doing any harm apart from collecting all garbage into spaces behind cupboard, my parents did not have much objection to his stay in our house.

But now that I saw him running into a corner, I thought why not get hold of him at once and throw him out. So I moved towards the corner where I expected him to get cornered with a broom in my hand but now I was not able to find him anywhere. Where did it go? He must be there. He had not run away. There was no way out. But still it vanished somewhere.

I looked around carefully. It has already made an escape route ready. I saw a small hole dub between the door frame of kitchen trolley and the wall. He had carefully removed some white cement put in there to fill up small gap in the corner between the floor, the frame and the wall. Through that he went inside the kitchen trolley where I was very difficult for me to tackle him. When I opened all trolleys, the small pieces of paper collected there indicated that he was staying there since long.

That night, my wife woke me up at around 2 am. There was some noise in the room. I woke up and switched on light and started looking around. To my surprise I saw a mouse. It must be the same mouse because...... he was trying to make small hole for his free movement in and out of our room. I looked carefully to see exactly what he was doing.
He was cleverly trying to make a hole by using the same trick; he was trying to exploit the weak section where door frame touches the wall. He had already removed some small amount of cement.
I was amazed to see his effort.... he ran away behind cupboard. We slept... after some time there was the noise again. This time without switching lights, I got hold of my camera on table and tried to click by aiming it towards the door. I wanted to take a photo. But I missed the aim and he ran away. I opened the door so that he could move freely and I could sleep.

I remembered the definition of the term “Learnability” I learned in Infosys, it was something like “ability to draw generic knowledge from specific experiences and use it in unknown situation.”. Here this animal was doing exactly the same thing. It learned it in kitchen and was applying the knowledge in other rooms.

I have always had a fascination for the mice. This creature is always treated as a clever and intelligent character.
I am an ardent fan for Tom and Jerry and especially Jerry. Also look at Mickey Mouse....
If you are a movie fan and have seen movies like Mouse hunt you will definitely agree in the literature like “Panchatantra” also a mouse is a portrayed as an intelligent character.
The height above all is the “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”.... there it says that entire earth is system created by mice to solve the problem of origin of the universe and they monitor we humans like guinea pigs in an experiment. It cannot get bigger than this :-)

Everywhere, a mouse is always treated as a clever character. This was the first time I experienced it myself...