Ants in My Pants

After living here, I have gained a new level of understanding of the phrase “ants in my pants.”  Ants are not only in my pants—they are EVERYWHERE!  I ate my first ant last week.  On purpose.  Oh yes, you heard (read) correctly.  I opened up the jar of honey and low and behold, a gazillion ants frantically running to and fro inside not to mention those who drowned in the viscous liquid.  For the 3^rd time in the last 3 months, I started the task of fishing out ants from my honey.  If I was home in Canada, I would have thrown away the honey like most westerners.  However, honey is a luxury item here and few can afford it.  I usually use it to sweeten my curd (bumpy yogurt with no addictives) and museli breakfast.  With whatever I receive through people from God, I spend it very carefully and wholesome foods are definitely a priority.  If I throw the honey away, I have to invest 10% of my monthly support once again.  So I diligently remove all the dead ants in the honey so they don’t decompose and add extra protein to my breakfast.  The next morning, surprise, they’re back again!  I had closed the lid tightly, but according to Vimal, they keep marching in circles until they get around the seal.  Magically.  This time I’m too hungry and weary to remove every single ant.  So I just disposed of as many as I could and took the plunge.  I scooped out some honey with ants in it and mixed it into my cereal. 

One thing I’ve learned here is how to turn the blind eye to many things.  When the kids are generously feeding me a bite of their snacks, how can I start thinking about where their hands have been and reject their love?  When someone feeds me a bite of cake for his/her birthday, how can I contemplate all the mouths those fingers have been in before they started shoving cake in my mouth?  When I eat my rice, how can I ponder which cloth Ama used to strain her rice and whether it’s the super-brown discarded sari blouse on which I saw 30 flies alight upon earlier?  When I dip a pail into the water tank to fetch water for washing the ditches, how can I consider the swirly insects that I’ve observed swimming playfully in the water or all the decomposing leaves that have fallen in or the buckets that have been dunked in which most likely weren’t cleaned properly after being set on the bathroom floor?  I can’t.  I just lock those thoughts into a tiny drawer in my mind and keep going about my tasks.  That is my survival tactic.  Just keep going, just keep going, just keep going and going and going. 

That being said, I do take note of some repeated unhygienic behaviours and educate (as well as nag!) the kids accordingly.  But I just gotta pick my battles and deal with a few behaviours at a time, otherwise I will drive myself as well as the kids up the wall nagging.

I digress.  Hmmmm…. Here are a few more interesting places I have seen ants:

-          Pouring out of every crack and crevice in my 16-year-old cement wall as well as behind electric sockets

-          Crawling all over my dirty clothing

-          Swarming over my brown rice sealed tightly in a heavy-duty plastic bag

-          Creeping out of my instant noodles

-          Dancing on my favourite multigrain biscuits (unfortunately, I saw—and felt!—the ants after I took a bite of the biscuits I had opened the previous day)

-          Trekking on my walls in a uniform line

-          Teeming in a circle around a dead baby lizard on the floor of my room

I’ve discovered that the tiny red ants have super sharp teeth: they can gnaw through sturdy aluminum-lined plastic (such as my instant noodle packages), chew through cardboard and even bite human beings!  A bite feels like a little sting and afterwards it’ll swell up like a freshly-scratched mosquito bite.  After they carry off the bits of food they want, they leave behind this crumbly residue.  There have been several times I’ve opened my instant noodles only to discover that the ants have already ravaged it.  In those cases, all I can use is the spice and flavouring packages and then I take from my supply of dry noodles.  My solution: put my food in a plastic tub, fill the lid with water and place the plastic tub on the lid.  The moat works. 

I asked Vimal why ants suddenly appear in huge armies overnight once summertime rolls around (in India, that’s in March).  I mean, why can’t they just be content with eating food all year round?  It’s not like the winters are actually cold and the coolest temperature I’ve experienced is like ~12C late at night.  Besides, I’ve seen them wandering around in the winter time.  Maybe those were the outcasts that were exiled from their anthills (or rather, ant crevices).  But I guess the ants here are extra diligent in the oppressive weather because the behaviour of ants is the same all around the world.