Bed Bugs and Us...

“I finally found the proof of existence of bed bugs in our new house” – my roommate comes shouting with joy from his room. The joy on his face could be compared to space explorers just after having discovered life on Mars.
This discovery, howsoever trivial, was important. This single-handedly explained all the red marks and rashes on our skins. The bedbugs, our common household pests, have been like our pets for more than a year now. In our previous apartment, after having lived in denial for five months, we had found some small ant-like creature crawling on our bed and we threw away the bed immediately. The reason for shifting our apartment lay in confusion regarding the property deed between bedbugs and us. We thought that we had rented the apartment for a year, while the bedbugs insisted that we had encroached on their permanent residence. After seven months of bitter battle in which we lost litres of our blood, the bedbugs finally won and we came to our new apartment eight weeks back.
The new apartment, seemed a promising one with spick-and-span look, clean rugs and no sign of bedbugs, but itches and rashes started their surprise apparition on our skins all over again. I was living in denial till my roommate showed me a living proof of our tiny guests. In all these months of war with bedbugs, this was the enemy’s first soldier we had caught. Despite all the pent-up rage, we were faced with moral dilemma. I posed following question before him:

1. Does Geneva Convention apply in this case?
2. Should we treat this single bug as a prisoner-of-war or put charges of waging war against us and treat accordingly?
3. If prisoner-of-war, PoW for short...

The last question is deliberately left incomplete because at this point my roommate picked up his slippers and literally beat the pulp out of the bedbug in question while murmuring choicest of abuses in Hindi. R.I.P. bedbug!