Reading Janaki Lenin’s My Husband And Other Animals invokes two things. One, nostalgia of the silent afternoons I spent alone in the urban wilderness of our apartment’s backyard, watching a dozen different insects going about their daily routines of forage or migration or basic survival. And two, a yearning to boot out of this urban environment once and for all and disappear into a sparsely-populated village.
My parents were not too celebratory (a trait that I’ve fortunately taken to its extreme). There was just once when mother asked what I wanted for my birthday. I think I asked for a microscope – I was young, naive and assumed that these things cost something like 200-500 bucks (a sum I assumed was within the budget for any birthday-related expense). That never materialized anyway and was soon forgotten. But I knew why I wanted one of those things: I spent all my afternoons in the backyard, looking at ants, centipedes, beetles, earthworms, dragonflies, lizards… watching them survive an onslaught or get killed, forage for food, migrate almost as if blind, and burrow into the earth or rush into dark crevices.
As school kids back in the 90s, we were usually taught that nature nurtures. That nature is ruthless and cruel would be taught to us by Attenborough’s Planet Earth but since we did not have cable network at home, I couldn’t watch it. But I did have a crystal-clear glimpse of what nature really is one summer afternoon after school. It was a quiet, sunny, weekday afternoon with nary a breeze. I was watching an ant-colony that had made a crevice on the floor (near the door to backyard) its home. The usual business was afoot with tens of ants pacing in and out every second.
A healthy but thin earthworm was crossing the concrete to get to the other, muddy side. As it happened, a soldier from the ant-colony happened to bump into this slimy thing. The earthworm was many times the size of the ant so it was the ant that recoiled. Then it bumped again – this time, deliberately – to inspect the earthworm. Almost suddenly, then, for the ant, the earthworm had become food. A quarry to drag uphill (for there was a slope before the hole-in-the-floor home).
Of course, the solo ant couldn’t do anything to the worm. After half-a-dozen tries, the ant left the earthworm and briskly marched over the slope and disappeared into its house. I thought I had seen my first foolish ant.
Five seconds later, a huge army of ants emerged from the hole. It was war. And they knew exactly where they were headed, what they were going to do and what the outcome would be.
I don’t know how in a short span of five seconds that small ant had conveyed the information on quarry and galvanized a commando unit. If it was part of the unit – which I assume it was – I couldn’t know for sure. A lot of them looked the same.
The commandos marched swiftly to the earthworm, which had hardly moved a few millimeters since the first ant bumped into it. The attack was on from all sides. Much as it may wriggle, the ants clawed strong and were in no mood to let go. Wriggling, perhaps writhing in pain, desperately trying to shake the attackers off, the earthworm now had a new force acting on it: like iron filings in a magnetic field, the ants were suddenly pulling the worm up the slope towards their queen. Everyone was working in tandem earnestness. The pull was strong and the earthworm, with no arms to hold onto something to offer a resistance, was swiftly being carted over the surface.
Within a minute, I was watching the tail of the worm disappear into the crevice. It was ironic. The earthworm wants to go into the earth anyway. Just not in this manner.
For me, it was okay to watch dead or dying insects being carried off by an army of ants. What use is the dead or dying if not as food for the millions of things that live. But to watch a perfectly healthy, live-and-kicking worm get overpowered and carted off as that day’s meal – with such cold, undramatic, military precision – was a shock.
Many days later, I watched the ants repeat their feat. This time, it was a much bigger quarry: a slightly-wounded cockroach that could still walk but just not that fast. A swarm of tiny soldiers rode out, commenced their attack and within minutes, were pushing the cockroach down the hole. The hole was barely large enough for the cockroach that was still trying to kick and open its wings. Big enough or not, the ants were shoving it down and after many tiny adjustments, the hole gorged up the roach. It felt like watching a living being buried alive.
In any event, this time it wasn’t shocking. Instead, I was filled with awe at the relentless march of natural instincts and a respect (with a tinge of fear) for ants.
Many many years later, I watched a fascinating documentary on ants, Lord of the Ants, narrated by Harrison Ford and focusing on the work of E.O.Wilson who comes across as one of the most amazing yet humble pioneers of biology, comparable to no less than Darwin. The fascination for ants has grown manifold ever since.