Flea-love on a writer's desk

 

The houseflies go gloatingly nibbling at your peace. You are helpless and watch wrathfully, nursing animosity. To rub salt on your wounds they land on your face, the representative of your worldly identity. That seems like vandalizing the holy altar of your existence by stomping their dirty feet on your facial skin. You turn taut with attention; muster up all determination to be at your quickest best. Then you take a ferocious swipe. You hurl all agility stored in your cells. But the houseflies are always quicker than the best of your shots. They escape unharmed. In fact, you run a high risk of pulling some muscle due to the sudden jerk to your limbs.

They doze past your furiously swatting newspaper or any other weapon you have at hand. They buzz away with elegant novelty in the art of escaping. And with a sneering, bantering buzz again land on your skin, to itch your frustration once again. This behavior is in close proximity with making a mockery of your sense of being a human, the supreme species on the earth. But over a period of time, you settle for mild reconciliation and finally sign armistice from your side.

Out of the thousands of strikes and swipes, effected with crouching hate and anger, I have hardly bruised even a wing in my confrontation with the houseflies. But this day it was a golden chance to strike with ravenous glee and kill two foes in one little strike, and undo all the humiliating hops of yore. But there are moments when such an act would sound full of revulsion and, more seriously, dishonorable.

A housefly pair is making love on my table. The fiery flakes of my revengeful self turn to cool showers of curiosity. I’m stopped from sledge-hammering this stupefying dream of these two tiny insects. At this tiny point in space-time fabric, a little episode of sensuous and voluptuous frequencies is unfolding with surrendering grace. I’m reading my morning newspaper. I turn pages. I move. I shift, snort, sigh, yawn and finally hum an uncouth Haryanvi ragini about a farmer’s love, which is basically an animalistic lust.

I’m gloating over them like a shameless peeping tom. They are just a couple of feet away. They are oblivious to any kind of danger today. Aha, love’s animated, flattering tones! All the force of fear and survival now focused on giving a pleasurable crescendo—to heave their species onwards from their end. I take my illegal prying into their private matter even further and start taking their pictures. My mobile is just inches away from them. It seems a bold couple. They aren’t shy of getting filmed in their moments of deep intimacy.

Initiated by the male by striking or jumping into the female (like a typical male of any other species), their lovemaking can last 30-120 minutes. Well, it can give a big complex to most of the humans. Mating comes quite naturally to the species on earth. But to the human mind, it comes as a complex ritual.

The male houseflies use pheromones (produced by the females) to detect a female by colliding with them mid-air or ground striking. The drone tries to force open her wings. If she accepts his advances, she vibrates her wings to make a buzzing sound. Copulation begins, as it does now on my table. They must have had a very heavy breakfast prior to this as fly-mating takes a lot of energy and they need their bellies full before the ritual of procreation.

The drone fertilizes the female eggs. She then lays eggs in a filthy, warm, moist place. From my table she will go and fly to lay eggs on feces and filth a day after. The eggs will take a day to hatch. The larvae (maggots) will bury themselves in the filth and an adult fly will emerge from the pupa. In five to six batches over three or four days a housefly lays around 500 eggs in its lifetime of 15-30 days.

I have the choice to allow the rationality of mind—that these are carriers of diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and worms—to stifle the poetic romanticism of lovemaking insects, and squash them down with a newspaper strike. If I do this, I can easily close-up an entire branch of houseflies. It will wind up the new pathways for 500 new houseflies in a week, which would have ended up starting new chain reactions of 500 further houseflies from those previous ones, and onwards similarly. That means I would stop the evolution of millions of houseflies from this end. The rationality of the human mind would encourage one to stop at least one door to the proliferation of these germ-spreading insects.

But is there anything in nature that has not its benefits? Houseflies are waste decomposers and eat poo. A single tiny larva eats about a half gram of organic matter in a day. Beyond the side issues of disease transmission, hygiene and sanitation practices, mother nature produces them to decompose the natural and human-produced organic waste including feces and carcasses. There are houseflies because there is excess of organic matter that hasn’t been suitably and properly managed. That opens the breeding potential for these opportunistic feeders. They lap up the putrefying sap with their sponging mouthparts.

Moreover, their pathogenic immunity can be studied to help us understand the causes and factors of immunity to help us devise similar medical defense guards for the humans also. So in the scheme of mother nature it’s not clear whether stopping this particular point of evolution would be beneficiary or disadvantageous in the ultimate sense.

I think instead of trying to kill a pair of lovemaking houseflies, I should try to properly manage the organic waste around me, at least on my premises. That seems like a real solution—an effort to remove the cause instead of merely tempering with the effects. Helped by the self-approval of poetic romance, I strengthen my moral fortification and allow the fly couple their moments of surrender to the energetic throng of procreation. They are not concerned about my choice. They take their time, oblivious to my shuffling and flicking newspaper.

The drone then takes off after many prolonged minutes of joyride on the rollercoaster of creation. He has played his limited part in the process. The female has a bigger role to play. Her part has just started. She sniffles around for a couple of more minutes, preens her wings and takes off to look for a suitable filthy site to lay her eggs the next day.