“You cannot escape the bugs,” writes Anisha Joshi, beginning this haunting tale of a childhood season, almost surreal and almost psychological, and also not so easy to leave behind. Joshi, a young Nepali writer and Duke Kunshan student, speaks briefly on Nepali authors and fear in a short interview; and lastly Jack Calder investigates our entomological anxieties. Read on!
The Story
Locusts
by Anisha Joshi
It is so hot that you cannot escape the bugs—try as you might, they will simply fly along their winding, invisible lines until they eventually find you. The locusts made landfall three days ago and flew on eastwards the very next day, but the lawn is littered with rusty wings and stiff legs. Not a single head, though. The crows must have made off with all of them.
Aama squats over the little vegetable patch, ankle deep in the mud. Damp with sweat, stray strands of her graying hair cling to her temples. She hums to herself as she pulls out weeds, squelching around softly. The air is suffused with the scent of fresh grass and rain.
***
When I was eight, I woke from a fitful afternoon nap. I had been dreaming of the time two years ago when Aama had gone to another country for work.
Whenever she left to another city or to another continent altogether, she would always tell me she would be back in five days. But five days often really meant a week or two until she would get home, sometimes bearing woven baskets from Biratnagar or cotton towels from Bangladesh. This time, work had whisked her away to America—a place that sounded so far away that I could not fathom her getting all the way there in the twenty-four hours she said her flight had taken her.
But this time, five days stretched out into two weeks, a month, then two, until I could no longer count the days. She would call on the landline every Sunday evening. Every time we talked, I imagined her voice dancing along a long, curling wire wrapped around the globe, starting from a city I could not even picture to the receiver in my hand. But this time, no matter how loudly I called for her into the receiver, I could not hear her voice. My sister ushered me off to sleep. I restlessly tried to fall asleep, tossing and turning. I moved over to where she was supposed to be, singing me to sleep. I tumbled down a deep, endless hole instead.
***
This is the first time I have ever seen locusts, all the way in Kathmandu. The city was usually too cool for locusts, but I supposed in the sweltering heat of this summer they had finally dared to fly over the hills and into the valley. The plants—big, drooping taro leaves and shiny corn leaves—are a mosaic of little holes the locusts have eaten into.
I watch from the door, sitting on the cool marble steps as mosquitos flit in and out of my view.
***
I jerked awake in a cold sweat, out of the dark nightmarish tunnel and unto the bright summer afternoon. Something was grinding in my ear, almost deafeningly. It only got louder each time I moved, and I rapidly descended into a panic. It could have been water, a seed, a cockroach. Every time it shifted positions, it rumbled as deep and low as an earthquake in my head. I whimpered and jumped around in fright.
“Kei hudaina baba, we’re going to the doctors, okay?” Aama assured me. As she rushed me to the ER, I imagined it eroding away my eardrums and eating its way to my brain.
***
Aama walks back, rubbing the soles of her shoes on the grass to get some of the mud off, and sits with me on the steps. We stare out at the hills together. The locusts had flown right over them in a rusty cloud yesterday.
I pick up a stray locust wing and twirl it in my fingers, watching the world beyond it in a reddish kaleidoscope of veins.
“Do locusts bite?” I ask absently.
“Only if you’re green enough,” she says, smiling.
I lay the wing on my palm and blow it away. It flutters into the distance.
“Do you think it will come back? Or has it gone eastwards too?”
***
The waiting room had been dark and grimy, its yellow walls smudged with dirt. I clung to Aama’s arm, curled up on the cool wooden bench. After what seemed like forever, the doctor called us into a room. The walls were painted blue. After fumbling around with a penlight, the doctor figured it was a winged insect that had somehow made its way into my ear.
“Can you get it out?” my mother asked.
“Unfortunately, the ENT doctor isn’t in today. You might have better luck with another hospital.”
Aama had been so calm up to this moment—as she’d taken me to the hospital, patient and reassuring, calm and collected as she’d filled out the paperwork. We got into a beaten down taxi to begin a crawl through the dense Kathmandu traffic during rush hour to the next hospital. She kept craning her neck to see how much longer we had to go.
***
At night, it thunders so hard I lay awake in my stifling room, staring at the spiderwebs shimmering in the occasional flashes of lightning. It is a futile war. No matter how often I clean out the ceiling corners, in a couple of days the spiders are back at it again. It is a futile war I cannot win, but the nights I struggle to fall asleep, I imagine the spiders scuttling down the walls and crawling into my nose, mouth, ears . . .
When the rains ease away, I still lay wide awake, listening to the wild symphony of toads, cicadas and crickets. Over this cacophony, my thudding heart feels like a splintering drum exploding in my chest.
I toss and turn in my sheets, sweaty skin clinging to them in a tangled mess.
***
The hallways were bright, flooded with the harsh light of fluorescent lamps. After a short wait, we were called into a room. As it fluttered louder and louder in my ear, I clambered up the cold examination table. The doctor instructed me to roll onto my side, so I was no longer looking at Aama. A smudged white instead.
“Don’t panic, and be still. This is just water, okay?”
A cool liquid filled my ear, and the doctor quickly drew it out into a shallow stainless-steel bowl. It was a large brown ant with wings, floating in the clear water.
***
A buzz. Deep into the night, as I finally begin to drift off into sleep, I hear a deafening buzz. Something skitters across the hard surface of my windowsill.
My heart drops. I lay in stiff silence, and it skitters again.
Against the will of my body, I raise myself and rest against the headboard, muscles limp.
A locust the size of a human stares at me from across the room, perched atop my desk. Every time it shifts position, its serrated legs scratch and scrape the desk. Its wings brush against my stack of books, but they are too flimsy to push them over.
With my heart and breath colder than the July heat would have you believe, I drop onto the floor and crawl out of the room. My sweat falls onto the soft carpet. When I turn, the bug is still staring at me, beady-eyed and patient. My heart skips a beat every time its legs scratch across the surface of the table.
When I reach the door, I pause for an eternity, my head hanging between my shoulders, my mind a swirling vortex. I drag my arm up to the doorknob and push the door open, slamming it shut as soon as I make it out.
I run to my mother’s room, gasping in cold and shallow breaths, barely composing myself before I go in. Across the hallway, I can hear its legs drag along the carpet.
“Sorry Aama, I think there was a bug in my room. It was just too loud,” I whisper, crawling into her bed.
I hold her arm as I used to as a kid during the weeks, rarely months, she used to be home. In my head, she is singing to me the same poem, the one about two sparrows, she used to sing to lull me into sleep.
Kura garchan kasari,
Bhangra ra bhangeri?
Churchur garcha bhangero,
Chirchir garcha bhangeri.
Charo charna hunna hai
yataautaa naheri
yauta akho ta heri
arko akho ma heri.
***
As soon as I climbed off the table, Aama engulfed me in a long, deep hug. We walked out of the hospital and met my aunt. My aunt told me she would be taking me home.
Aama needed to fly to another city for work.
Brief Interview
Deva Eveland: Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about this story or its background?
Anisha Joshi: I wrote the story thinking of how as a kid, I expected that as I grew up I would be able to shed some of my fears, like bugs or dogs or the dark. Nothing of the sort has happened yet, in fact I am as scared of the dark as I am of the job market. The story started taking shape when I saw a huge stink bug on the carpet of my dorm room, and I spent a solid half hour paralyzed in fear, then had to get help from some maintenance staff.
DE: I’m guessing most of our readers, myself included, don’t know much about literary traditions in Nepal. Do you have any Nepali writers to recommend? And what writers (Nepali or otherwise) have influenced you?
AJ: I would really recommend something by Prajwal Parajuly and Manjushree Thapa, they have some beautiful novels based on the experience of being Nepali, at home or abroad. In terms of inspiration, these days I find myself drawn to Sally Rooney because I feel she has a very compelling way of writing about love and growing up with the backdrop of social issues.
DE: Do you principally write in English?
AJ: I’d say I write in English more than I write in Nepali, partly because I’ve just spent more time writing creatively in English. I’ve been trying to spend more time writing in Nepali but I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable sharing it publicly.
Critical Accompaniment
There’s a long-standing human tradition that repeats itself every summer, with every person, almost everywhere around the globe: a bug lands on you, and you slap it off. Depending on your individual sensibility, you may gently coax it elsewhere, or dispatch it with positive relish. But the consensus is clear; the bug’s got to go. And almost always, afterwards, a ghost itch springs up where the bug once was, or metastasizes across your skin, giving the illusion of a thousand different insects moving about, drinking your blood, burrowing deep inside you.
But there’s something different about braving the insect masses on a summer afternoon, and hearing a singular unwelcome buzz late at night in your room. In the latter situation you listen with a kind of mute dread, as it buzzes away and back, always spiraling closer, always with unseeing eyes trained upon inviting ears, nose, mouth. The phrase “he wouldn’t hurt a fly” reveals how unusual it is, in this situation, not to kill. The anxiety is simply unbearable.
It’s this spiraling, buzzing anxiety that animates Anisha Joshi’s story. The anxiety caused by an unknown thing which nevertheless has its eyes set on you. There’s no escape here, no rest; the pursuer is implacable. The narrator imagines that from her radiates an enormous network of “invisible lines,” along each of which something is flying which will eventually, inevitably, find her. She never sleeps, or if she does, only fitfully. Even after the locusts, the apparent object of her fears, have left, she asks: “Do [they] bite? . . . will [they] come back?” For her, they can never leave. Their line has simply taken them elsewhere for a moment.
The only moments of apparent respite seem to center around the narrator’s mother, who is lingered over and described with loving detail. The way “stray strands of her graying hair cling to her temples,” or how she rubs “the soles of her shoes on the grass to get some of the mud off.” The narrator almost seems to caress these images, as though she were clutching onto them, just as she clutches her mother’s arm. She is soothed by their solidity, their presence. But the moment never lasts. The arm is withdrawn. And where the mother once was, there is now a “deep, endless hole.”
This absence stands at the heart of the story. The mother, the narrator’s only comfort, cannot be depended on. She leaves for work and says it will be “five days”—perhaps only intending to reassure the narrator—but what the child learns instead is that the mother lies. That the mother can lie. The only force capable of stabilizing her reality, of protecting her from the unknown, is itself unstable and unknown. Suddenly, the mother becomes just another something at the end of “a long, curling wire wrapped around the globe.” What does she really want? What does the bug in the room want? The narrator can’t “hear her voice.” There’s only a buzzing, here . . . there . . .
Bugs don’t provoke anxiety because they can hurt us. They make us itch, or produce a rash—nuisances, surely, but not worthy of fear. They make us anxious because we don’t know what they want. We can study them of course, understand their foods and mating habits. But when you are staring down the erratic flight of a fly, there’s no telling what line it will take. Behind its eyes there is only absence.
Where there once was a world for the narrator, now there is only a “mosaic of little holes.” The ant that lodges in her ear only completes the process begun with her mother, “eating its way to [the narrator’s] brain.” Consider how she reassures herself as she is buffeted from doctor to doctor. Yes, she clings to the mother’s arm, so “patient and reassuring”—but the calm is an obvious façade. A lie. An unknown. Instead, she turns away from the mother, to surfaces. The “yellow walls,” the “walls . . . painted blue,” the “fluorescent lamps,” the “smudged white.” Flat surfaces, clear objects. Anything with obvious function, that shows what it is; anything that can fill the anxiety of absence. But nothing can. Yes, the ant is drawn out; the buzzing remains.
Now the human-sized locust can be understood. It’s not that the narrator’s fear of bugs has taken hold of her, inflating one out of proportion into a terrible threat. Rather, the incident with the ant has only revealed the world’s buzzing absence, which hurts without explaining.
The narrator runs away to Aama, but the bug remains. Even with the door closed, she can still “hear its legs drag along the carpet.” And even the comfort she seeks from Aama, the song from her childhood that soothes, she sings to herself. Aama has flown away.
—Jack Calder
Anisha Joshi is an undergraduate from Kathmandu, Nepal, studying sociology at Duke Kunshan University, China.