by Vani Viswanathan
“Ammaaaaaaaaaa!!!” I remember screaming as I ran through the length of the house, from the backyard, to reach my mother standing at the door speaking to the neighbour. Tears were streaming down my face as I held my left arm, folded at the elbow, close to my body.
“Deepu! What happened?!” my mother asked, and then looked at the folded arm.
I wailed even louder as she came to examine the arm. I had touched an innocent wickerbasket in the backyard – a basket she put things in and took things out every day – but when I tried pulling something out, out had flown a bee that gleefully stung me. It hurt like hell. There was a red, inflamed patch right above the elbow. My uncle – Amma’s younger brother, who had been visiting – scooped me up and tried to calm me down. He rubbed sacred ash on the inflamed patch, and while I don’t know if it helped the wound, I stopped crying (it might have also been the packet of colourful Gems he seemed to have magically found for me at that moment).
Insects and I have always had a strange relationship. Perhaps a year or so after this incident, I was bitten by a centipede and developed a rash that saw me scratching uncontrollably in school for days altogether. I viciously fought my way in a debate with a swollen lip, caused by a particularly vicious ant. A startled, large worm once crawled out of my white school kameez, making me jump in fear in school every time I felt any movement around my back. Mosquitoes find me and bite with a viciousness that my friends are usually spared from. Little red ants always find their way into my most well-sealed food items, and large, dirty moths seem to prefer my room over any other.
For a very long time, I was scared of insects. It made me feel like a stereotyped girl who squealed at anything remotely scary. I hated it, but the very sight of a cockroach made the otherwise bold me stop at my tracks. These days, I wonder if it was disgust rather than fear; I wonder if the reason I fled the room if I saw a small worm crawling on the wall was my disinclination to voluntarily, knowingly harm another living animal.
Well, whatever it was, it all changed.
These days, I mercilessly squash anything that annoys me, or let it live if my non-violent side shows up – crawl up my arm if you want, and maybe, pretty worm, I’ll admire the beautiful ridges on your back.
How did it happen, you ask? I wish I could spin a wondrous tale of bravery which saw me getting myself – and other affected people, for more drama – out of a sticky situation.
Alas, I’ve not had such remarkable instances of life-altering incidents – all I can offer is a series of everyday episodes which simply put me in situations where I emerged stronger.
Perhaps the first was when my 80-year-old grandmother tottered into my room as I was screaming after finding the worm in my kameez. “Deepu?!” she said, her voice quivering with concern. I was huddled in a corner of the room, behind the door, in my white vest and brown pants, halfway through getting dressed for school. As I told her of the calamity that had befallen my only dry and clean kameez, she tried not to sigh, walked up to where the kameez was hung, picked up a stray piece of paper and wheedled the worm to crawl onto it, and flung it out through the window. I stood there, ashamed, a 13-year-old scared of a worm, while the 80-year-old handled it with nonchalance. Could I ever try to be like her, I thought, in my partially-dressed state. That very second, a chill ran through my spine and I shivered; just the thought of a worm was enough to unsettle me.
Providence saw me thrown into a hostel flanked by a jungle on one side – the side my windows faced. No matter how tightly I shut the windows and switched on mosquito repellents, I would wake up with mosquito bites all over my body – all this while my roommate woke up fresh-faced and unperturbed by those demonic miniscule beasts.
It was during these times that I was once sought to help chase a vile, black lizard out of my friend’s room. She herself laughed at the irony of it; I had dropped my pen in fear when she mentioned the lizard, but there was no one else in the wing, and the damned thing wasn’t moving off her mouse-pad and she needed to submit an assignment. Armed with a broom and a dustpan I went there, and tapped endlessly at the table with the broom. It didn’t budge. Standing as far away as I could, I stretched my arm to its fullest, and tapped on the lizard itself with the tip of the broom. The lizard burst into life. It scrambled on to the broom, at which point I gave a blood-curling scream and dropped the broom. My friend and I leapt on to the bed and watched the creature run out of the room. We were halfway through our victorious hi-five when I noticed the lizard turn right – towards my room. I dashed out with as much speed as I could muster, and ran into my room, and shut the door, only to see it casually come in through the gap between the door and the floor. I clambered on to my bed and cursed my friend heartily. Thankfully, the maid came in at the moment and prodded at the lizard and it left for the grassy patch a good few metres away from my room. I broke into tears of relief, and realised at dinner that evening that I had chased the lizard out of my friend’s room – a fact she thankfully, benevolently acknowledged to the others present at the table when they laughed at my mentioning the incident.
Perhaps what made me less non-violent towards the creepy-crawlies was watching my 18-year-old roommate squash a bug that was stubbornly refusing to stop buzzing around my tube light. She deftly took a magazine and closed its pages around the flying bug, and gave the magazine a squeeze. A few seconds later she opened the magazine with a wide grin on her face – there was a splotch of unnameable colours and a flattened-out body with legs and broken wings sticking out. I controlled my urge to retch – it would have been rude. All the same, I was awed with the ease with which she had solved the problem. I realised I didn’t feel a rush of sympathy for the dead creature; I was glad the pest was gone.
Since these days at the hostel, I have made a magazine my best friend when it comes to tackling these creatures. Of course, mosquitoes still bite me with an especial vengeance, but they are tackled with a more straightforward brutality, and I grin if I kill one; I look at the thin, red blood and feel nothing. I watch worms that invade my bathroom during the rains shrivel up and die as I throw salt on them. I pick up snails on strips of paper and flush them down the toilet.
I’d be lying, however, if I said it’s all kill and no sympathy these days. As I have grown older, in fact, I see myself being more inclined to live and let live. And that’s why when I saw the tiny green worm that I first mistook as a stray thread on my green kurta, I watched its spongy, suede-like skin for a few seconds before brushing it off. That’s why I chase the cockroaches all the way through the house on to the verandah so it can get a chance at life in a drain. That’s why I open the windows when a moth or a bug flies in, and shoo it away with a magazine instead of trapping it between its pages. And that’s why, when I felt a pinch on my right arm the other day and looked down to see a breathtakingly-beautiful bug – brown, with red rings on its back – crawling up and down the arm, I smiled at it, for it was proof of the various little pockets nature decided to store its beauty in; as its sting got a tad more vicious, I blew on it, and it fell gracefully on a green leaf.
Vani Viswanathan is often lost in her world of books and A R Rahman, churning out lines in her head or humming a song. Her world is one of frivolity, optimism, quietude and general chilled-ness, where there is always place for outbursts of laughter, bouts of silence, chocolate, ice cream and lots of books and endless iTunes playlists from all over the world. Vani was a Public Relations consultant in Singapore and decided to come back to homeland after seven years away to pursue a Masters in Development Studies. Vani blogs at http://chennaigalwrites.blogspot.com
