On Chasing Grasshoppers by Kalai Selvi Arivalagan (good ebook reader txt) 📕

I still remember the annual exam holidays, when we chased grasshoppers in the vacant plot that stretched before our house. Even the minimum showers during the summer blessed the land with thick bushy plants.

Short, bushy, Thumbai plants with their white flowers and nerunji plants crept along the ground with their bright yellow flowers were really a treat to see.

The nerunji plants had dry thorny fruits that at times could prick your feet and made you shout in pain. If you pulled the broken thorn from the thick skin of your bare feet, little drops of red blood would ooze out.

Whenever the thorn pricked my feet, I plucked a few leaves of Thumbai plants, crushed it and patted it on the mark of the wound on my bare feet, and within seconds I felt relieved. The fresh herbal juice of the Thumbai leaves was cold on the skin and it immediately gave a soothing effect.

Sometimes we plucked the white Thumbai flowers and made garlands out of it. The small chakras made out of Thumbai flowers resembled my favorite evening snack ‘muruku’ made with rice and urad dhal.

While collecting the Thumbai flowers, it was a feast to watch colorful butterflies that flew around the Thumbai plants to suck the nectar from the white flowers. It was wonderful to watch the butterflies stretching their proboscis and drinking the nectar. Most of the butterflies had black wings with red eye like structures painted in the middle.

Apart from butterflies, numerous grasshoppers hopped around. There were grasshoppers of all sizes; from tiny to big grasshoppers. Green colored grasshoppers, brown colored grasshoppers, and pale grey colored grasshoppers.

It took a while for me to learn how to catch the grasshoppers. The grasshoppers kept on hopping and jumping from one place to another.

We caught the green colored grasshoppers and filled our glass bottles with many of them. After having them inside the bottle for some time, we would release them from the bottle once again.

One day we caught so many grasshoppers and we wanted to feed them to our chickens. We wanted to do something different on that day. We gathered dry twigs and leaves that were scattered below the trees. One of us took a sheet cut from an empty talcum powder tin.

We all then built an oven with the broken bricks and stones. After filling the oven with dry twigs and leaves, we placed the sheet of tin on the oven.

With the match stick we lit the dry leaves and twigs and made a fire. When the sheet got hot, we placed the wax collected from burnt candles.

The wax started to melt and it looked like oil. One by one we took the grasshopper out of the bottle. We removed the legs and the head of the grasshopper. Shamelessly, we didn’t even realized how painful it would be for those grasshoppers.

We then roasted the headless, legless grasshoppers in the melting wax. After roasting the grasshoppers for a while in the melting wax, we took them out from the fire.

We placed the roasted grasshoppers on a waste paper and called the chickens to taste the toast. The chickens came running and ate the grasshoppers within seconds. We all clapped our hands and laughed loudly.

The memory of chasing and roasting grasshoppers is still fresh in my mind. The difference is now I feel I don’t have the right to kill the grasshoppers like this and how they would have cursed me for taking out their lives.

Every living thing in the world has the right to live their lives. Is it childhood frenzy that made me do that? Why should I choose those innocent grasshoppers and feed like that to the chickens? Does it reflect the cruel nature that is hidden deeper within me?

When I narrated this to Priyanka, one of my younger colleagues, she passed on a remark. “That is too bad. How dare you do that?” I apologized to her. She shared with me an incident during her school days.

During rainy seasons, grasshoppers from the school garden would come inside their class through the windows. Whoever caught the grasshopper was considered lucky, and they might bring them prosperity and wealth.

I felt ashamed and could not face her directly for a few minutes.

Butterflies always fascinate me.   I still remember our childhood days when we all eight of us run chasing different colored butterflies that fly from one flower to flower.

Even though we succeeded in catching grasshoppers, butterflies always escape from our hands.  We were rarely fortunate to catch a butterfly and then check our fingers stained with specks of colors from the wings of butterfies.

Images: en.wikipedia.org
Publication Date: 03-30-2012

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Dedication:
Beautiful days when we chased butterflies and grasshoppers