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Oh wasp, where is thy sting?
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Good ol' creepy-crawlies are sometimes confused by city life and make costly mistakes
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Open house for tiger wasps
AN AIR of Shakespearean tragedy still hangs about my living space. So distinct was the sensation a couple of months ago that if sweet Ophelia herself had walked in, sighing and strewing flowers, I would have merely led her to a sofa. The equivalent of Yorick's skull sits on the dusty ledge of my front balcony. 'Tis a hollow, misshapen, clay object marked with perforations, resembling a crude agarbathi-holder. A tough yet delicate marvel, it is not made by human hand. I preserve it because it kindles in me two contradictory emotions: guilt and hope.
Let me come clean and stop talking in riddles. I stand charged of murder, or, to put it more accurately, assisted suicide. A mother wasp, leaving behind her unborn children, scorched herself to a cinder before my eyes and I didn't lift a finger to prevent it. Did I hear someone say Bangalore is Suicide City? But let's not attribute unnatural human behaviour to creepy-crawly creatures. The poor things are just confused by city life and therefore make costly mistakes. I'm thinking of the baby bat that brained itself against my living room wall one night (its velvet charcoal body no bigger than that of an outsize moth). Flight error, crash landing — was that what happened to the wasp, too, when she zipped towards the 60-watt bulb in the upturned light-shade? Impossible. She had made a thousand trips to the balcony to build her nest and feed her young, and she had never once flown into the living room, let alone after dark.
She made her appearance one morning, looking deadly in her black-and-yellow-striped coat, and I quailed as though I'd seen a tiger. My disused pedestal fan seemed to interest her deeply. She nuzzled it and fussed over it during 20 exploratory sorties before deciding to get down to business. I mentally bade goodbye to the balcony, for the wasp had laid claim to it and I couldn't set foot on it without looking around fearfully. The mother-to-be clocked in punctually and, without a single day's absence, toiled until dusk as if she were competing for the Construction Worker of the Year Award. She used the protective frame over the fan blades as a foundation, with the thin circular bars acting as beams and girders. On each trip, she clutched a tiny clod of red earth. School textbook diagrams took shape in my mind's eye: the wasp's nest was supposed to comprise grey, papery, hexagonal cells. Mud was never mentioned. Maybe this kind of wasp was harmless. How to find out? If only I had had the sense to look up a dictionary (which I did when it was too late) I would have found out that the tiger wasp is a social wasp. My ignorance made me stay off limits, cursing the transgressor.
Many days later the nest was complete but for an aperture on top. She continued to fly in and out, resting for a minute before taking off; she must have been laying eggs through the opening, I guess. Came a new turn of events: a thread-like green worm wriggled in her grasp and she proceeded to stuff it down the hole. Was this food for her grubs? And where on earth had she managed to find such a rich cache? Worm after worm fell victim to the — er — Black Hole of Clay-cutta. By and by, the live feed grew too heavy for her and she couldn't lift it up to the incubator. She would come sailing in, land on the floor, and then struggle to rise three feet like a toy plane weighted with a brick. After many an unsuccessful take-off she would discard the still-live creature and go back to fetch another. My balcony floor began to look like a battlefield with squirming green bodies that gradually lay still.
The wasp gave up at long last. She sealed the hole and made herself scarce. I no longer felt I was exposed to a firing range when I entered the balcony. It was 8 p.m. or so and I was at my computer in the living room when I heard a familiar flutter. She made straight for the burning light. My irritation mounted: would she never cease to pester me? She circled around the fatal glow. I didn't shoo her away. The noise of her wings died down and she descended into the shade. It didn't take long for my guilt to blossom in full. I groped for a handy excuse for her inexplicable action, and found one: she had instinctively killed herself once her sole purpose for living — procreation — had been fulfilled.
A few days later I noticed that the nest had developed a hole — and then two holes, then three, then many more, swiftly, magically. The newborns had broken through their clay womb. My guilt was somewhat expiated when I saw for myself a young wasp, its stripes glistening mint-fresh, pause on the ledge in the mid-morning sun before darting off into the wide world. Once the holes stopped appearing I eagerly counted them: 13 in all. Then I gently prised away the nest and placed it within eye's reach.
It's open house for tiger wasps from now on.
C.K. MEENA
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