Crickets and their brethren are basslines of the songs that abound the outdoors, vocalizing canopies or anything damp with their chirps and twirps… while the birds bebop from one branch to another, they skittle around with the same restiveness, punctuated with those quantum leaps every now and then…
The chirps of crickets and cicadas have underlined many a childhood living in the periphery of the woods, including mine… each species with its own instrument of vocalization but having the same effect of accentuating the spookiness of the night, breaking its stillness with their intermittent trills… a subconscious bridge of sorts, leading one back to the forest trails…
There was this pumpkin vine that had overtaken a small patch of land outside the house, the fruit was still some distance away but the insects were busy nibbling away at the rest… day and night one could hear the chirps of the crickets as they crept along the large, lobed leaves, chewing away at the serrations…
There’s so many aspects to this insect… it’s a food, for thought as one wonders what was it that made Collini establish it as the voice of reason in his fairy tale, and for the palate too, savoured as a fried snack or being experimented into cookies et al, as the world mulls over entomophagy perhaps being the answer to food and nutrition security, a whole new world of farming… a good omen in some cultures and harbinger of death and misfortune in other… they can be house pests, their chirrups reverberating into a full-blown concerto indoors or feasting on clothing, and quite amusingly, pets too, being fed or fed to… strange fetishes to domesticate…
Maybe ‘twas the monsoon fever that made them so active during the day, the males in a hurry to mate… scurrying around, looking for someone to serenade… apparently one can do some mathematical wizardry and tell the outdoor temperature by counting the number of chirps… didn’t work in my case though…
There’s this entire discourse on the sentience of insects, and ‘tis a difficult area to study… when was the last time one can remember seeing insects behave in a way that didn’t seem to be driven entirely by instinct… given what we see of them and their relatively short lifespans (even those lasting years have a fleeting adult life), its difficult to look at them as anything beyond automatons fulfilling their role in the intricate web of life… I spotted atleast half a dozen crickets on the vine and there must’ve been , waving their long, long antennae furiously, their stridulations mingling with the noises of a sleepy little part of town going about its business…
Musings on crickets, Ranikhet, Uttarakhand
