Little ant lost
View(s):
Communal event:Dimiyas building their leafy nest. Pic by Karuwalagaswewa Jayaratne
“paayan-aa kale-dee – Rae-daval mansi-vee – kanta dhey
raes-karavu …Koombiyo”
Am back again in my armchair, in the garden on the little cement apron at the gate surrounded by the once-burnt-out grass, now sprouting rank and aggressive. On the apron ants of all shapes and sizes – not colour, because all are black – carry on, busy doing their work. Some large, some miniscule and all full of the milk of ‘humankind’- ness. No conflicts. Each one is alone: do they have identities? Personalities?
Quite some years ago, I was working at the female-dominated CSHR. They were all young girls, exuberant and gossipy and there was not a dull day at office. I was the grandfather figure. Lunch time was an event: all opened their lunches and started distributing tidbits from their own to others: all knew whose mother made the best whatever-it-was. It was a communal event.
But not that day. That day I was alone. I unwrapped my lunch box from its blanket of a napkin and – out stepped a solitary ant, which started moving around. I watched it awhile and then flicked it away. Later, I got to thinking.
Why did I do that? Where did it go? Whatever happened to it? It was all the way round the Universe and back for it to find its way back ‘home’ (its own and mine). Where do displaced ants go? There must be a large number which are displaced daily. And there are so many kinds of ants: some hardly visible and other an inch or more long. I have seen the tiny ones sculling around, and under the legs of the bigger ones. They must live in different worlds. If my own ‘lost’ ant managed to find a community of its kind, would it have been taken in? Or quarantined? Or shown the door? So many questions. No answers.
When we were small we were scared stiff of the tiny red ants. The servants called them ‘thel koombiyo’: we thought it was because they would apply coconut oil when we were bitten but I think they had the habit of clustering round bottles of oil. A more muscular and vicious variant was the ‘nayi koombi’. Then there were the busy little black ants always running from place to place: they were harmless. Then there were the large red ‘dimiyas’ who were really tree-dwellers: but they would bite, too. The most vicious were the ‘kadiyas’: large, black, always foraging and always ready to attack.
It was the ‘dimiyas’ who first made their presence felt in Dehiwela. Maybe they came for the mango tree we were growing, and they came from the ‘jak’ tree across the road. Telephone and other wiring were highways to them. I watched them cross the inch-or-so gap between the two gates: one or two would hold on to each other and form a bridge for the rest. Another day I saw one rappelling down on a silken thread and was amazed that they could spin one. But they could. They would build their leafy ‘nests’ in the large-leaved trees by sticking them together with this ‘gum’. I showed these things to Mihiri and she made a necklace out of the scene – two ants spinning a web and dewdrops forming on the threads. She won a prize for it.
The mango tree died and the ‘dimiyas’ disappeared. Then came the ‘kadiyas’ and made us all very vigilant. Their bite hurt, and raised a weal.
Around my chair, in the garden, I see some of them scurrying through the grass. It must be like a forest to them, but apparently not. Sometimes they are on top of the grasses, sometimes under them. And they seem to be able to navigate through the ‘thanakola pissa’. I’ll be damned if I know how. And they had their communal homes underground.
The ant in the grass-forest reminds me of how my father and I were lost in a forest, once. It was in Kantalai where the forest was being cleared for colonists. Someone had seen ruins in the forest and duly reported to the Archaeological Dept. So we were there to view them. But our guide could not locate them. In our way was a mass of fallen trees, acres of them. They must have been felled by the two Cat” system (cf. Duleep) of clearing jungle – this must have been in 1955 or so. We were stumped. We would scramble over one log – only to find another field of them. We gave up. I thought the ants would have seen the grass forest like that, but they didn’t.
They took the grass in their stride. They could navigate their way home, carrying bits food and even fallen comrades with them.
They must belong to a superior race.
But – they do some of the things we do and take pride in. Gerald Durrell describes how a domineering type of ant plan and carry out a three-pronged slaving raid on another type of ant, taking over all their eggs which would eventually hatch into slaves. Suspiciously human-type behaviour. Others are farmers and hoarders: I have watched them evacuate the husks of grass seeds they have collected and feasted on.
Yet another kind grows fungi for food. Human-type activity, again.
They may be a superior race but….. perhaps….. they could stop being so very human?