You basically have three stages: Defence, warfare and the retreat.
'Defence' : All the things you can do keep the cute little darlings out of your house.
'(Trench) Warfare' : They've breached your defenses. Plus points range from cute music around your ears, and bites that let you appreciate the stillness of the night at 2 am - but you need to fight. There's hand to hand, Airborne (we'll come to that later), aerosol/repellant cream/coils, etc - chemical warfare,
'Retreat/Suffer': You have been introduced to malaria, dengue or chickengunya. The last one doesn't even have allopathic cures; in most cases you have severe joint pains for years after recovering. And you groan/whine and suffer your way out of these illnesses.
Clearly, 'defence' is preferable to 'warfare', and 'warfare' hits the 'suffer' out of the park.
Defence:
When we lived in single-family house, the standard plan ingrained into us was that by 6 pm, you make sure to close all windows & doors. And keep them shut until atleast 8 pm. And that is pretty effective in keeping mosquitoes out the rest of the night, so long as you live in non-mosquito breeding area.
In apartments (where we now live), they mosquito squadrons have different schedules. From 6pm till around 7pm, they feast on the evening walkers that are brave enough to wear shorts and short sleeves. Little babies are...well.. its like taking candy from babies. You can almost hear the wicked laughter while the kids cluelessly slap themselves silly.
The winged also have allies in our local Udupi restaurants - ours keep their 'AC rooms' shut till 8pm - and force you to sit out, and get feasted upon while you feast. And the restaurants still do roaring business- one suspects some kind of deal with the devil.
Back to the apartments: Around 7 come out the maintenance staff with their own concoctions of medicine (mostly kerosene, it feels like - from the odour) and start spraying around the plants. These concoctions are designed to look convincing to the human eye in terms of the smoke produced - since they are using up the aparment-owner associations' money for this purpose.
Convinced, the heretofore exercising brave humans make a beeline for the elevators - all the while playing the 'slap-your-thighs, clap your hands, listen to the music and slap-your-face' game.
This is the indication to our winged crusaders to start out for the upper floors.
Theories abound on how they get to the really high floors -from some of the finest minds in the Bengaluru software service industry:
- They follow people into elevators - the very ones that are fleeing the medicine spraying
- Their wings are deceptively powerful and can fly up all those floors
- They track wind currents around buildings, and use the right drafts to 'glide' up alongside buildings. And along the way, they enter apartments mission-impossible style upon spotting 'clients'.
- When nobody is watching, they manage to bunch up to create enough mass to press elevator buttons...
- etc.
Warfare: There is always the 'clap-n-slap-till-you-drop' approach.
There are mosquito coils which spit out rather scary smoke. They do keep mosquitoes at bay - but there are enough suspicions about the damage they cause to humans.
There are now electronic bug swatters sold at most traffic junctions at around 100Rs. These are like small tennis rackets, and work reasonably well. But mosquitoes seem to have learned about them. I was evidence at a friend's where the little buzzers kept above 10 feet altitude. He was climbing various tables/chairs to get at them, but they pretty much hugged the ceiling. (The airborne warfare I was referring to)
Retreat: Not much to talk here- one just hopes not to fall victim. BTM Layout - the area I stay next to - is a Dengue hotspot.
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