SOME THINGS LIKE GOD ARE JUST INEXPLICABLE

Since Friday I am in the Netherlands to visit my very terribly sick and very aging parents. This morning my mother decided to run over a tiny spider with her walker in the kitchen, complaining about those bastards son of a bitch-spiders that find the outside too cold and manage their way into their million dollar penthouse. I was shocked. Killing an innocent spider with the wheels of your walker? Mother! So I had a conversation with my Mama about Indian wildlife before lunch. I think it wasn’t very beneficial to Mama’s recovery and she said she needed a few hours of solitary rest in her deluxe bedroom in the east wing, which gave me the opportunity to sit behind her laptop with internet connection to type up this story.

Last night I already shocked the Bloody Jesus out of my parents by eating Dutch Hutspot with chopsticks and by verbally offering them Reiki treatments in order to scare the cancer out of them. Reiki? Are you going to touch us? With your hands?
“Veer, no thank you. You’re not going to touch us in any way, we’ve got a nurse for that.”
“Who’s Veer?” I thought. O ya, I used to be called Veertje by the Dutch (short for Veronique). It means Little Feather. A lovely Native American Cherokee or Apache name (I guess) for a Dutch girl. My last name “Renard” is French for Fox, so Little Feather Fox sounds pretty exotic for someone who's surrounded by cows, tulips, cheese, windmills and wooden shoes.
For the past nine years people call me Pantau or Tau or Tao and these days Veer sounds like a different person to me. To make a long story short, I was talking to my mother about my wildlife in India. I told her that, once, I lived together in my room with Jimmy; a large female spider, the size of a Dutch male hand. She lived behind a tin trunk opposite of my mattress. In my trunk I kept my traditional Tibetan costume, boots, shirt and hat, one of those with four fur flaps, which I would wear on special occasions, thus little need for me to open the trunk every day and disturb Jimmy.
I called her Jimmy, not because she was a female-to-male transgender cross-dressing spider, but because she was a very large spider that never revealed her true gender to me until she popped out a thousand or so petit mini-spiderlettes. Anyway, Jimmy and I bonded. Am I not scared of spiders the size of hands? O hell Jesus, I surely am. But after living in India for a while you get used to things, including spiders and other wildlife. When you see a scorpion in your bathroom you don’t call 911, you just observe the scorpion, you arrange for a piece of cardboard and a bowl, catch the scorpion and release him in nature, which was only one foot away in my situation. I also believe there is no 911 in India. 911 in India comes in the form of a bucket of sand near a stove or an auto rickshaw to the nearest hospital.
I was surrounded by nature on my mountain top-town of Dharamsala, India, the hometown of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Jimmy would spend the entire day behind the tin trunk and not show her face until I would switch on my little television to watch one of 45 satellite channels provided to me by the local Himalayan cable-television project for 150 rupees (a few dollars) per month. I enjoyed watching a Chinese-type version of MTV, watching lovely Chinese singers of the female and male variety sing pop ballads, but I also enjoyed watching V Channel Asia that tends to focus on Japanese and Korean singers and pop groups such as Super Junior, Ken Hirai, Angela Aki, An Café, F.T. Island, and Howl.
If I would not use my TV as a music producing device, I would watch American Idols on Star World. And I must say, I love American Idols, and so did Jimmy. Every evening we watched television together, and when we were done, Jimmy would hide behind the tin trunk and I would blow out my candle stick or switch off my Tibetan lamp. I can’t believe we lived together for over 6 months.
One day she suddenly had a lot of children sitting on the back of her hairy back (her back was the size of a Dutch egg) so it could hold a lot of spiderlings. And then, one day, she was gone. She had disappeared from my petit room. Rather rude; she didn’t even shake hands, she had 8 of them; she didn’t Namaste me, or thanked me for accommodating her for such a long period of time for free. I always wondered where she got her food from, because there was little to eat in my room. What do spiders eat? And is it possible for a pregnant spider to go without food and drink for such a long time? Perhaps something for me to Google up.
Interestingly, that day I discovered she had accidentally left behind two of her children. Accidentally I say, because I don’t think she was a bitch of a spider. The two little spiders were the size of fleas and they found their way to my little washroom/bathroom. It had a sink with a little metal thing above it to put my toothbrush on. Against the wall was a very unusable mirror as well as a water heater and shower-thingy. Very luxurious for Indian standards. There was even a device to pee and poo in.
Anyway, two of Jimmy’s children had found a new place to stay in that little bathroom, in the right upper corner very close to the ceiling. I noticed one time that they actually drank water. They would come down from the ceiling at night and go to the metal thing above the sink that always had some drops of water on it. They would drink from the water droplets and then climb back to their right upper corner and stay there in a very little web-like housing.

Dear reader, I have been meditating a lot on what goes on in the minds of insects, whether they enjoy their lives, how they find their fulfilment, or if they are just happy by doing nothing for 6 months behind a tin trunk, be happy with a little slurplette of water every evening or watching American Idols on television. Life behind a tin trunk doesn’t sound appealing to me, but having said that; living in India with a monster-spider in your room doesn’t sound very appealing to most people in the West either. Yet I am a happy person, still. I was never bothered by the two children of Jimmy. They grew up in my bathroom, catching little fly-thingies from the air, and drinking water from the area around my toothbrush. I have never seen them in my sleeping area, and they never bothered to watch TV together with me. One day, when they were about 6 months old they left my home. They were the size of a peanut and probably had had a look through the little air vent at the wonderful pine trees that surrounded the building I lived in and thought: that would make a better and more exciting accommodation, perhaps we can find some girlfriends in one of those trees and catch some food in our spider webs to offer to our spider chicks.

For some inexplicable reason I always thought that the two little spiders were male; two brothers. I don’t know why, there were no spider penises visible to the naked eye and believe me, I had better things to do than looking for penises on very small spiders. Nevertheless, they always occurred to me as males, but I can’t explain why. Some things, like God, are just inexplicable.

Next time I am going to tell you a little more about Indian wildlife. I have a few monkey-stories that will blow your mind.

For now, greetings from a freezing cold Holland. Oy vey.