All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Entymology 101

I’ve bugs on the brain. Several instances with insects in the past week or so have really got me thinking. The monsoon rains make Kolkata a damp, muggy breeding ground for wildlife and serious introspection alike. My lessons of late:

1. Science history is exciting. I used to find dusty tales of who-discovered-what-when fantastically dull in my 9th grade biology class, but reputed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh changed my mind. I’ve been reading his Victorian/futuristic medical thriller “The Calcutta Chromosome,” which chronicles the mad scientific race to “discover” the malaria parasite. I never thought a book about mosquitoes and the colonial era people who loved them could be so gripping. It’s full of conspiracy!

2. Cockroaches ain’t so bad. In fact, I've befriended the one in the flat (I've been trying to post the pics I took of him, but no luck). If I make a restroom trip late enough into the night, I just might get lucky enough to catch him perched on a wall, gyrating his four-inch antennae and cautiously eyeing me. The omnipresence of these most-feared of common, subtropical pests (each roughly the size of a cigarette lighter) has toughened me up quite a bit. I no longer scream like a banshee when I see a cockroach. They’re actually pretty harmless.

3. Listen to your parents and finish your food. The other day, I found hundreds of tiny ants crawling around in a brand new bag of rice I had bought from an upmarket store. Not knowing what to do, I regretfully tossed it into the waste bin. This morning Lokhi (ironically named after the Hindu Godess of wealth and good fortune) came to clean the bathrooms and take the garbage out as she does everyday. But this time before she left, she turned and said to me “I found that rice you threw out the other day and I took it. I cleaned it and dried it—what beautiful, beautiful rice it was! I have three children and it fed them for several days. Please ask me before you throw something like that away again. It hurts me. It just hurts me.” I agreed and ushered her out the door as quickly as possible, but when she left I stood behind the door reeling. I spend pretty much all day thinking and theorizing about poverty in the abstract, conceptual language of academics, but these are the moments that I learn the most.