The largeness of trifles

 

Ant trails. They quite often have an intriguing story if you can follow them. A file may trace itself to a dead animal, environmental disturbance, or something else which is of importance to them and of interest to a naturalist. If you cannot trace back to the end of the line, it is engrossing to think about what they may be up to so busily, so hurriedly.

During the monsoon months, you will find ants to be decent foretellers of rain. Especially in the countryside, where there is a vast and unhindered sky for them to sample above. They sense it – these scurrying barometers. Whether its humidity, the temperature or just their own formicine acumen to scry clouds. Those whose nests are at risk of being submerged, grab their eggs, and white larvae, and start shifting house to higher ground. Or they may gather as masses on tree trunks and walls and wait till the spell passes. Showers almost surely descend after such behavior.

Yes, on some occasions ants decide to move only after their quarters are partially inundated. And at other times you may see a colony vacating and gaze up at the skies, but they may only be doing so because a dog was digging the mud and rolling over their nest. Or a gardener has been filling it with a watering hose.

I recount one April day, an occasion I have written down in an old diary from 2012, at Pathashaala. It was a searing hot morning with weak wisps of clouds in the sky. A miracle was needed for it to rain. But peculiarly, close to noon, ants started marching out. Shifting serpentine lines were running frenetically over all the paths, carrying their white and brown broods. Indian Black ants, Hunchback ants, Procession ants, Fire ants, Long-horned crazies, all of them. There were long files everywhere like every single nest was being emptied out. Ants gathered on the classroom walls, the stone benches, tree trunks, solar lamps and any other place they found above the ground. Bi-coloured arboreal ants congregated on the metal gates. This was certainly an ecological-omen indicating something. We didn’t figure it out immediately. But soon we got know that a massive earthquake had hit Sumatra and Indonesia, and all of us here around late afternoon felt the passing tremors.

I was fascinated to read that snail shells are actually comprehensive weather maps, which we have just begun to learn. Specifically studied has been the African Giant Snail, one whose range has extended across the world. It is a voracious eater of every known crop. Its the farmer's adversary. With the rains, these gastropods sprout everywhere there is vegetation. The feet of running children and idle-walkers would crunch upon many on the school paths. A black shapeless mass would lie there pierced by shards of its own shell. In sometime a group of more snails would be there around and over their comrade’s carcass, feeding on its muscles and spilt body fluid. They fed on anything.

Prosenjit Ghosh and his team from the Indian Institute of Science have discovered that the markings on the shells of these Giant snails are faithful records of the Indian Monsoon patterns down to a weekly basis. Snail shells grow based on water availability. During the rains the snails use water with ¹⁶O, the most common isotope of Oxygen. During drier periods the snails are forced to absorb water with the heavier and rarer ¹⁸O which is more abundant then since water with this isotope doesn’t evaporate as easily. Studying these variations on a snail’s shell, researchers can trace the monsoon rains of different regions with impeccable time resolution. Like looking at tree rings. Given that a giant snail lives for about a decade if not stepped on, an empty shell is an archive of rainfall for all those years. A weather hard-disk, where stored are the good showers, breaks, droughts, storms and floods of the past. You may find one lying on the wayside.

Ants and snails remind me of what Sherlock Holmes tells Watson. In the Boscombe Valley mystery, after solving a case knitting together the most insignificant and absurd details he observes at the crime scene, he tells his friend, “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles”.  In the natural world, this maxim can be extrapolated to sublime lengths. It makes our surroundings raw and throbbing with wonder. Trifles. They are everywhere. The most seasoned naturalists are tuned to them - tracks, marks, scat, scents, scratches, sounds, silences - what most never see. As are poets. ‘Trifles’ bring to my mind dust specks catching the sunrays as they roam looking imprisoned in a cone of light. It brings to my mind sand grains which cling to my fingers inside my pockets after a trip to the beach. Have you looked at sand closely? They are such complexly shaped things, some resolvable by our stare and numerous touching the sill of invisibility, falling into the rifts of my palm lines like they were ravines. There is a faint salty air which emanates even from a few grains of beach sand which instantly conjure the ocean again. And a sand grain can tell us the age of the Earth. The atoms ticking inside it keep a memory of their genesis. We have managed in our short history to comprehend a few words of what a sand grain speaks. Isn’t that what speaking is? To reveal, to remember, to express? And what else does it whisper of, of the cosmos and eternity? A traveler, a pilgrim, by water and by wind, one who has seen the Ocean’s depths. 

Wisdom is also the capacity to notice the small things. An experienced one sees what is overlooked and is enthralled by the mundane. Which brings up another story to mind from my time as a teacher in Pathashaala. We were facing a two-day power cut when the children were there, curbing every routine. Water couldn’t be pumped up the tank, the clothes couldn’t be washed, the fans didn’t run, and the kids refused to sleep. On the third day, when the electricians advised that a power cable maybe leaking somewhere under the ground, the mains were switched off and across a hundred-acre campus, staff were digging everywhere for hours, searching for the broken cable.  Later that day Murugaiyyan, our most experienced farmer on campus, came back to school after period of absence. Walking by the classroom block on his way to lunch, he was concerned about a wilting coconut sapling flanking the path amidst a row of healthy ones. He asked for the ground to be dug beside the plant and there was found the ruptured electric line.

We are susceptible to the little things. To trifles. We search for them. Live for them. The very large and influential seem superficial – too engulfing and drastic to be delicately felt. They happen once in never. But the little things determine us, make our days beautiful or painful - smiles, gestures, replies, touches, assurances, affirmations. They are all there is. And so too the sparrow in the morning perched on the window sill, the street dog’s love, dung beetles crossing the path, the tailor bird’s call, the feeling of tree trunks, seashells, haikus, the flight of damselflies, the strong mint-like petrichor of rainy summer nights, bees bringing thick yellow pollen from the Copper-pod blossoms across the street to my balcony. Compassion lies in the little things.