Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [8]
The tharagar was not being generous; the Adivasis were known to be as undemanding as they were exploitable.
The deal was done in five minutes. The Nadar family’s exodus posed hardly any problems. Apart from a few tools, linens and household utensils and Mangal, the irrepressible parrot with his red and yellow plumage, they had no possessions. The next monsoon storms would demolish the hut, unless some passing family happened to take possession of it in the meantime.
One morning, just as Surya, the sun god, was casting his first pink rays over the horizon, the Nadars set off, with Ratna and his father, Prodip, leading the way. They all carried bundles on their heads. The small caravan, to which other Mudilapa families had attached themselves, left a cloud of dust behind it. Young Gopal, the parrot cage in hand, pranced for joy at the prospect of adventure. Padmini, however, could not hold back tears. Before the road veered away to the north she looked back over her shoulder for one last time and bade farewell to the hut that had been her childhood home.
2
The Planetary Holocaust Wrought by Armies of Ravaging Insects
The misfortune of the peasants from Mudilapa was just one tiny episode in a tragedy affecting the entire planet. The black aphids that had driven the Nadars from their land were among eight hundred and fifty thousand varieties of insects—which, since the dawn of humanity, have been stripping us of our food supply. Many of their names give scant indication of the nature and magnitude of the disasters they cause. How, after all, would anyone ever suspect the oriental fruit moths, red-banded leaf rollers, rosy apple aphids, striped stem-borers or indeed white-backed plant-hoppers, of such capacity for destruction? With their flamboyant carapaces and their elaborate and varied weapons, these parasites are among the most fabulous creatures in the bestiary of God’s imagination. The dazzling iridescence of some fruit-eating moths is reminiscent of glittering, bejeweled apparel and quite unlike the hairy coat of the repulsive caterpillars that destroy cotton fields. Every species has its own method of surviving, to the detriment of its prey. There are insects that suck, like Mudilapa’s Indian aphids. Then there are pulp-eaters, plant-eaters and wood-eaters. Some grind up their prey with their mandibles, some suck it dry with a long proboscis, others lick it before sucking it up through a sheath encircling their tongue and yet others stab it with a “dagger,” then pump out the sap. Some nibble at leaves, gnawing them into crenallated shapes or puncturing them with little holes. Others invade the leaf canals and spread themselves through the veins. Dense foliage suddenly finds itself riddled with whitish spots that harbor armadas of assailants the size of pinheads. All at once, healthy, vigorous plants find themselves covered with brownish powdery pustules, which cause them to wither and die.
The muscular, ballerinalike thighs of Mexican bean beetles enable them to jump from stem to stem like circus acrobats, while yellow stem-borers haul themselves over leaves as laboriously as tortoises. The beetles that kill grains are threadlike; the tipulas that destroy vegetables look like mosquitoes engorged with blood. Moths with shimmering, scaly, double wings that live on lentils, hairy thrips that kill olive trees, scarlet acarus worms that are the terror of the orchard—all form part of a sinister, infinitely small jungle teeming with life.
Because of their unlimited capacity to adapt, these insects are found in any environment or latitude, from the blazing sands of the African desert to the Arctic ice floes. Some have been responsible for many of humanity’s worst catastrophes: the grasshoppers that plagued ancient Egypt; the phylloxera aphid that wiped out the French vineyards at the end of the last century; the Colorado beetle that caused the Irish potato famine.
These little creatures are