May I Interrupt Your Life?

Imagine if your whole life is about being born, mating, chewing a tunnel of escape for your lady love and then dying without a single taste of the outside world. Aagaon didn’t mind the mating bit. It seemed natural, quick and over. What was disgusting was the chewing through all that fig and that too not for himself but some chick he had just met once.

Aagaon was the first fig wasp in the history of wasps (and figs) to have developed a distaste for figs. You couldn’t blame the fruit though. Poor figgy things, they were technically inverted flowers and could only be pollinated from the inside. They relied on the female wasp who was born inside them to take their pollen outside who in turn relied on a male wasp to tunnel her out (always a bad idea).

The female wasp who was Aagaon’s mate looked at him and thought what a sharp-toothed, wingless whiner he was. Once his duties were done, he was supposed to quietly die in the fig, getting digested by plant matter and adding to its sweet, chewy crispness. Instead, here he was loudly mumbling about not wanting to die and become fruit.

Before either of them could have a lover’s tiff a premature knife cut through the fruit splitting the fig and Aagaon’s mate into two. An unripe fruit is an inedible one and the knife wandered away looking for riper victims.

Meanwhile Aagaon, perched precariously on half a fig sat blinking at the sweetness of sunshine. He had never seen it before. Its dazzling light danced before his eyes and unveiled a world of colours for him. What an amazing place. Why were his species forced to live in the darkness of fig flesh? Why were only the females gifted the freedom to explore this dizzily exciting carnival of life?

He fumed for a second at the injustice but the beauty of what was on offer sucked away at his negativity, leaving behind a grateful heart unable to bear so much happiness. He saw the other female fig wasps flying around, doing the bizzy things they were supposed to do. He didn’t have wings and couldn’t fly. He didn’t mind. He just sat on half a fig watching everything. In some time, the sun set and still he looked and still the wonder grew.

A new day arrived and he saw how light changed the world. He nibbled weakly at a little bit of the fig. It still tasted disgusting. Ugh. He knew he was going to die. This knowledge didn’t kill him. He was, after all, the first fig wasp in 34 million years to get a taste of the outside world.

Moral: The unexpected knife may be the welcome break



Aagaon is drawn by the fabulous Bijoy Venugopal. You can find more of his wonderful stuff here bijoyvenugopal.com