Trap, drown, smash, poison: Indian rat catcher hard at work

MUMBAI -- Behram Harda was a dancer in the Bollywood films of the 1970s, gracing the screen with his twist and his cha-cha. Then he became a rodent assassin.

Today, in the sprawling B Ward of this teeming, filthy, exhilarating city, Harda is admired by his colleagues as the last of the great Mumbai rat catchers. His is a dying breed in a city whose dreams of being rat-free recede year by year.

Harda, 55, with a black-and-white stubble, is a gentle, relentless executioner. He fumigates. He drops poison laced with garlic and chutney into burrows. He brings new traps to shopkeepers and collects the previous catch for killing. The rats are sometimes drowned in buckets. Sometimes, they are seized by the tail and smashed onto the hot pavement.

Harda is an Indian Sisyphus. When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India's brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snack. But in three decades India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.

Private-sector jobs in call centers and software firms beckon, and the government struggles to attract men of Harda's caliber.

Many rat-catching posts lie vacant. Meanwhile, Mumbai has metastasized from a genteel city of a few million into a grimy megalopolis of 17 million. More than half the population lives in shanties surrounded by garbage, and consequently, by rats.

Strolling through a low-cost housing complex, Harda huffed at a heap of garbage defenestrated from the apartments above. Eggshells. Butter wrappers. Banana peels. Coconut halves. Mango peels. Bread. And sure enough, in the midst of it all, rat burrows.

Harda accepts that his is a losing battle. In 10 years, he expects Mumbai to have more rats, not fewer. "It is impossible to get them," he said.

But he keeps trying.

To accompany Harda on his rounds of rat-infested areas is to navigate a parallel city, a world apart from the malls and luxury apartments sprouting in Mumbai. Harda and three deputies strode through these lanes like the characters in the movie "Ghostbusters," cages in hand, nodding at passersby for whom their arrival is a daily reassurance.

By 10:05 a.m., they had two full cages in custody. Now the rats had to die.

The two cages were dipped one by one into a bucket, but the bucket was too short, and many of the rats managed to keep their noses above the water level. When the cage was restored to dry ground, the rats patiently rearranged their fur, as if nothing had happened.

But Harda had an alternative plan, which was not subtle or hygienic but was terrifyingly effective. One of his deputies plucked the rats from the cage one by one and, with the vigor of a Whac-a-Mole player, slammed each one onto the ground. The rat would convulse with shock, then suddenly go still. In some cases, its limbs would gyrate, Elvis-like, for a final few seconds. A few especially resilient souls briefly resurrected themselves to make a last, death-defying jump. And then they, too, died. The men killed 26 rats in five minutes.

All this may seem like strange toil for a man who once danced in hit Bollywood movies like "Brahmachari" and who still looks, in a certain light, like a man of film, his graying hair slicked back with shiny cream.

But when he was a young dancer, Bollywood was not much of an industry and a municipal job in a socialist country seemed more secure. His father made him trade the cha-cha for civil service. "I killed all my ambitions," he said.

Harda is not bitter. He is happy with his $210-a-month salary.

Rat catching is one of those jobs that swallow you whole, said the top pest-control officer in Mumbai, Ashok Adsule, who is Harda's boss. "You can be successful in this work only if you can imagine yourself in the shoes of a rat," he said.