You wake up at six in a PG room off Kankarbagh Main Road with three bites on your forearm. Not scattered around. In a line, evenly spaced, like somebody pressed a fork into your arm.
Mosquitoes do not bite in a line. Khatmal do.
Nobody wants to say the word out loud. It sounds like a verdict on your housekeeping. It isn't. Bedbugs have nothing to do with how clean your room is. They arrived inside the mattress, or in the cot, or in the suitcase of the boy who had the bed before you. They eat blood. Your dust and your dirty socks are of no interest to them.
They live in the bed, not on you
Lice live on you. Khatmal do not. That one difference decides everything you do next.
They feed for ten minutes at three in the morning and then they go home. Home is within a metre of your pillow. The piping seam that runs around the edge of the mattress. The joint where the plywood headboard meets the frame. The screw hole in the cot leg. The fold of a bedsheet tucked under the same corner for four months. Flat, brown, roughly the size of an apple seed.
So when you spray the floor, the walls and the corners of the room, you are treating an address they never visit. Next morning there are fresh bites and you decide the spray was fake. The spray was fine. The address was wrong.
Cold water does nothing
This is the part people get wrong, and it is the part you can actually control.
A bucket of cold water and two scoops of detergent will not kill a bedbug. It will not touch the eggs either, which are glued to the cloth and going nowhere. You can scrub that sheet on the bathroom floor for twenty minutes, dry it in the sun, make the bed at night, and hand them back their house.
Heat kills them. Sustained heat, not a hot minute. Around fifty degrees held for a stretch finishes the adults and the young ones. The eggs need a little more. That is the entire science, and it is good news, because heat is the one thing Patna gives away free.
Wash hot. Geyser water, or a bucket with an immersion rod, as hot as the fabric will take. Sixty degrees for half an hour, then detergent and a full rinse. Bedsheets, pillow covers, the dohar, the towel, the clothes lying on the chair beside the bed. All of it in one go, not three batches over three days. A khatmal will happily wait out your Sunday.
Then get it bone dry. Not almost dry.
The black bag on the terrace
You do not own a dryer. There is a way around that, and in September it works better than people expect.
Take the washed, still-damp bedding, push it into a black polythene bag, tie the mouth shut and lay it flat on the terrace between eleven and three. A sealed black bag in direct Patna sun runs far hotter inside than the air outside. Three hours. The pillows go in as well, and the cushion covers nobody has ever washed, and your nephew's soft toy.
This is also how you deal with what cannot go into a bucket. Curtains. The canvas bag under your cot. Shoes.
In December fog it does not work. Do not pretend it does. In winter you need the geyser and the iron.
The seam and the iron
Laundry is half the job. The bed is the other half, and it takes forty minutes.
Pull the mattress off and stand it against the wall in daylight. Walk the piping seam with a torch, both sides, all four edges. You are looking for the seed shapes, small rust-coloured smears, and the pale shells they shed as they grow.
Now take a hot iron and run it slowly along that seam, pressing as you go. Steam is better. Same treatment for the joints of a wooden cot and the back of the headboard. You are not cleaning anything. You are cooking a strip of fabric two millimetres wide.
Then pull the cot a foot away from the wall and leave it there. Get the mattress off the floor. Stop tucking the sheet into the same corner every single time.
Two things not to do
Do not shift to the other bed in the room. They travel along the skirting and the wall, and by next week you have two infested beds instead of one.
Do not pour kerosene on a mattress you intend to sleep on. It leaves the eggs alive, it stinks for a month, and you are sleeping two feet from a fire.
The honest bit
Catch it early, in one room, and hot water plus a hot iron plus two careful weekends will end it. If it has been running four months and the room next door is scratching too, the building needs treating and your bucket cannot save you. Tell the landlord. Tell the other tenants, even though it is an awkward conversation.
Either way the laundry has to happen, at temperature, all at once. That is the step almost nobody does properly, and it is the step that decides whether they are back in three weeks.
If you cannot get water that hot in a PG bathroom, send it out. We wash at temperature and return everything dry, folded and sealed. Carry the bundle out of the room in a closed bag, do the bed while it is gone, and bring clean cloth back to a clean bed.
Do it in that order and you get your sleep back.