Shared Territory

Last week I found a hornet in my room. It buzzed uselessly around the room's single light bulb, occasionally breaking off to swoop menacingly at my head. I had noticed the baseball sized nest hanging from the roof outside my window, but had decided that if I just ignored it hard enough it might eventually go away. As it turned out this was not an effective policy, as the huge black insects had apparently decided to claim new territory in my room. I went and got my host family, who cooed sympathetically at my predicament. My aamaa went down stairs and returned with a mouth full of kerosene, which she spit with startling distance and accuracy at the sinister gray hornets nest. Driven from their home by the deadly fluid, the hornets swarmed my room angrily. We retreated hastily.

I spent the next half hour sitting in the next room with my host father, eating peanuts. Now and then a hornet would venture our of my room, and I would jump up to the attack, swinging my thick worn copy of Heretics of Dune like a baseball bat and swatting them vengefully out of the air. When all the hornets seemed to have either fled or been killed by my heavy book, we used a straw broom to detach the now soggy and blackened nest, and bring it in through the window. Ignoring my pleas to take it to the next room, Shankar promptly cracked the nest open, spilling the fat white hornet larvae out onto my floor. These he explained, would make nutritious chicken feed. I went to bed, feeling triumphant.

The next night something huge and green awoke me with its loud flapping. I turned on the light and could tell by its dancing, distorted shadow that it was something like a grasshopper. I remained huddled within the safety of my mosquito net, and eventually it flew back out the window.

The day after that I returned to find a spider the size of my fist perched serenely on my window. The inside of my window. It was the biggest spider I have ever seen. I gently opened the shutters and flicked it away.

My room is not my own. It is the home, I am constantly reminded, of numerous ants, spiders, insects, and bugs. I've mostly given up trying to fight them. Once I accepted them, it ceased to be that bad. Now and then a small but insidious centipede will dart out at me when I open my suitcase, or a huge moth will flutter out of the folds of my hanging towel when I reach up to wipe the sweat off my face. Most of the time, though, I'll just wave my hand vaguely above my head, and try to make the journey from the door to cover of my mosquito net as quick as possible.

There is something incredibly humbling about sharing one's personal territory with the insect kingdom. I have come to feel a grudgingly privileged at being able to observe them so intimately. Their ways are so alien, and the uses they make of the room, the furniture, and, indeed, my own possessions remind me just how unique humans are when compared to most creatures on the planet. To them a suitcase is nothing more than a dark, dry place to hide. To me, it has a whole host of other meanings, meanings which to them, I'm sure, would be equally as alien.

I don't feel comfortable with them, though. The mosquito net provides an effective means of segregation, and I still twitch and jerk with paranoia at every itch and phantom caress that touches my skin when outside my nylon apartheid. At the moment I'm taking refuge in the air conditioned interior of the internet cafe. In a few minutes, however, I'll return home to the shared territory of my room, and lie there, listening to the hums and buzzings of a thousand lives not my own.