Tokays

In all the years I lived in Malaysia, I never encountered a tokay.  On one of my visa runs to Cambodia, I stayed in a bungalow in Kep. I discovered droppings on my bathroom floor that looked like they might have come from a medium-sized, cloven-hooved mammal.

I went to the makeshift rattan-bamboo bar, ordered something to soothe my nerves and asked the Belgian proprietor if he keeps goats.
"Goats? No... no goats.  Why?"
I described to him the pellets on the bathroom floor.
"Ah! That's from the tokay!"  He seemed pleased to provide this information. "You know -- the big gecko."
"I know about geckos," I informed him. "I live in Malaysia, and I have cicaks in my apartment."
"Oh, but those are the little ones. The tokays are big."
"I'm telling you, these pellets in the bathroom had to have come from a sheep, or a goat, or a... how big, exactly, are these tokays?"
He pointed to the ceiling. "There's one."
I stifled a scream.

People keep these things as pets. Some people.

Stuck to the roof of the bar by its little suction-cup feet was a baby crocodile. With polka-dots.

The smaller gecko, which Malaysians call a cicak (pronounced chee-chahk), is small enough to pass through the tiniest opening, and it also has sticky feet which enable it to hang out on walls and ceilings with nary a thought of gravity.  

Unfortunately, the cicaks are not house-trained, either, so one does need to wipe up after them. On the plus side, they eat mosquitoes, and since I've lived in the tropics, any enemy of the mosquito is a friend of mine. 

Both of these creatures' names are onomatopoeic. The little one emits a very high-pitched "chee-chahk". The big one barks. It chatters, and then it proclaims, "To-kay! to-kay! to-kay!" in a voice that's somewhere between alto and tenor.  

Here is an example of one that I found on YouTube, but the tokays around my house have a much deeper, more authoritative bark. Thanks to the screens on windows, doors and ventilation slots, they stay in the great outdoors.  I find when they're not stuck to the ceiling directly over my head (do they ever fall??) and not dropping fecal pellets on my floors, I feel much more fond of them. I've come to enjoy their calls.

My dear friend, Mark, loves the Habsburg Empire and rues the day it ended. When I once mentioned this gecko to him, he -- clearly ignoring the amphibian context -- began to wax lyrical about Imperial Tokay. This, he murmured piously, was the most revered tipple of the haughtiest Habsburgs -- a sweet wine from the grapes of a particular district in Hungary.  Now that I think about it, the big gecko's bark is a bit imperious. Maybe I should make an effort to find a bottle of Tokay and put a wee dram out for my polka-dotted neighbours.