A baby frog's breakfast

 

A chilly mid-December morning with minimum temperature around six degree celcius. The air seems to carry an enigmatical succor for lonely writers. The cold-beaten trees stand with a pointed disinterestedness. My tea seems to inspire a tiny baby frog. It’s safely tenanted for the winters but it sneaks out of the little niche in the plaster in a corner in the verandah. A very courageous feat for a frog to come out in the open in the middle of the winters. Maybe it’s very hungry.

It can’t hop around, given its frozen blood, it just crawls on all fours. It laboriously crawls around for half an hour. But these aren’t the perpetual merrymaking monsoon days. It’s a barren field, no ants, flies or mosquitoes. The distance it has covered will come to be at least a mile for a human if we use a comparative scale. There is nothing to eat. Dejected it comes back to its hiding hole. But it reminds me that I haven’t taken a long walk in the countryside this winter. Cold is no plea as this tiny frog reminds me. One should be in a position to take inspiration from whatever source it comes from. 

The little frog may have gone back hungry but the weaving ants on the tree seem well stocked for the season. Do you know the weaving ants are our predecessors in farming and cattle rearing? They set up their institutions in the form of leafy pans by gluing many leaves in a farmstead unit on a tree. They then gather live aphids in the leafy bowls and rear them pretty considerately. The aphids secrete a kind of sugary drop and the ants milk it as their reward for rearing these aphids. They even give mollifying tickles at the tiny aphids to encourage them to secrete the drop in playfulness. They protect them, feed them well, gently take back the stray aphids that go out like an errant sheep from its shelter. Every ounce of this existence is daubed with natural intelligence. It already exists and it isn’t the sole prerogative of the human beings. 

At night, the winter moon, even with its auroral radiance, cuts a lonely figure. The villagers sneak into the safety of their rooms just when it gets dark. The trees then share their solitude with the lonely moon. They whisper softly as dew and mist bathes their weather-beaten leaves. The dew crowns the flowers and all of them look happy in the morning, holding some paradisiacal secret in their smiles.