As I contemplate returning home to Mumbai, after three years in New York City as an international student, I brace myself for the pests I’m about to re-encounter: my nineteen-year old sister, the ogling men on the streets, and the insects that make up so much of my life in Mumbai.
Announced by a shrill shriek and the slam of a bathroom door is the affable Indian cockroach. Shaped and colored like a dark-cherry lozenge, the Indian cockroach usually scuttles along the ground, though some varieties demonstrate formidable short-distance flying skills that instantly bring audiences to their feet. Of course, New York City has cockroaches too; what differs is the technique of deportation. In Mumbai, a strangled scream through the window — “Watch-maaan!” — brings the security guard of our apartment building trundling up the staircase to take care of the intruder.
A sighting of the Indian cockroach is considerably rare. The desi housefly, on the other hand, is easier to find: it shall be precisely where it should not be. Behind the glass display of a food counter, perched pensively on the lip of a coffee mug, or, if it decides to take the plunge, floating belly-up in the coffee. It is the inexplicable cool tickle on your ankle, the whispering on your toes. When a housefly graces our home, my mother and sister charge behind it with mini electrified tennis racquets. A buzzing zap, followed by whoops of glee, signal the end of its visit.
Far less shrewd than the housefly is the large Indian moth, who seems to require none of our assistance in bringing an end to its own existence. With its ordinary brown wings and its hard grub-like body, the Indian moth swoops straight up towards the whizzing blades of our ceiling fan. Sometimes, miraculously, it emerges on the other side of the blades. But more often than not, a dull thunk announces the end of its re-enactment of Icarus. What is your hamartia, Indian moth? Vaulting ambition? Sheer doltishness?
Most dangerous of all flying critters is the Indian mosquito. It is a monsoon menace, since it lays eggs in stagnant puddles of water. During a holiday to Kerala, we encountered Draculean mosquitoes so large we could feel the prick of their proboscis puncturing the skin on our necks. The Mumbai mosquito is smaller but much more tenacious. It is in constant battle with my grandmother. She keeps purchasing small electric vaporizers all of which claim to emit poisonous vapors that keep mosquitos far, far away. Inevitably, just after she’s installed the latest vaporizer, she’ll spot a mosquito resting on top of it, blissfully immune.
There are other pests. Slim glistening earthworms that get flooded out of their soil burrows during the monsoons, whom my mother taught me to pick up on a twig, so they hang dejectedly limp like a noodle on a chopstick. Glossy black crows who drop out of coconut trees onto our terrace sill while we are eating breakfast, surveying us with rapid tilts of their heads, disappearing reluctantly after my sister yells and flaps her arms. Plump, brown sparrows who hop timidly towards the breadcrumbs my sister leaves out for them. (My sister only cares for the cute.) Thankfully, life in neither Mumbai nor New York City has blessed me with a first-hand rat account yet.
On Mumbai’s dark, wet, windy, rainy nights, we shut ourselves in. The French-style windows of our living room are firmly closed. Inside, warm, bright, yellow lights blaze. That’s when a mob of insects plasters themselves against the window, forming an thick tapestry of feet, fuzz, and exoskeletons. From the inside, we can only see the pale undersides of their wings and bodies pasted flat against the glass, as they try to escape the rain. We never open the window, of course, there are simply too many of them. It would be like the plague hurtling through our home.
They remind me, sometimes, of newspaper photos of immigrants and refugees pleading to cross the border, piling on top of one another, their cheeks squashed against the wire fence, desperate to come in to safety. Who owns this land, me or them? Who is actually the immigrant, and who the local? Why is it that the moment they appear, my knee-jerk impulse is to get rid of them?
Perhaps I should keep my windows open this time? But the insects bite and prick, and are never as grateful as they ought to be.
A heavily-edited version of this story was published in The Hindu in 2016. Above is the original version, as it was meant to be read.
