Goan Mafia Ants
One of the most striking things about renting a house in Goa is the sheer density of life in the house. There are squirrels who dislodge rubble from the roof onto your floor (meaning that you have to sweep every day) and give you a heart attack when they make sudden leaps between the rafters. There are lizards who prey on the mosquitoes, fruit flies and the odd wasp that gets lost and there are hornets who come looking to make nests and terrify me so much by their sheer size that I end up running inside and locking the door.
The real masters of the house though are the ants. There tiny little undertaker ants who faithfully carry away any cockroach that I squash with a shoe or empty beer bottle, red ants that spray acid on you and hurt like hell, and larger ants that would seem quite capably of stripping the skin off your face if you fell asleep for too long.
In any case, in my first season in Goa I learnt why it’s as well to show a certain respect to the original inhabitants of the house and please believe me, I’m not making the following tale up.
I’d moved into a new house and in the back room I found a bucket which I reckoned a useful acquisition. I picked it up and made about a thousands small ants homeless in the process but you know, God created Man to have dominion over the beasts etc and I figured there was no real harm done.
When I returned home that night though, ready to crash out on my sleeping bag on the floor (the house being as yet unfurnished), I fortunately had the presence of mind to turn on the light first. Over the floor there had been an insect Armageddon. Bodies of dead ants and small beetles were cast about, mostly dead or in the process of dying.
Before I could think through the implications of this, I pulled back my sleeping bag and saw that where I normally folded up my jacket for a pillow, there was the head of a mouse. On my grandmother’s grave. Not the body of a mouse, but the head.
Whether the insects watched the Godfather next door on cable TV, I was unable to say but on further investigation I also found a poisonous caterpillar further down my sleeping bag.
I didn’t give the bucket back but, on the advice of some friends, I burnt some incense in the back room and mentally apologised for my blunt entrance. After that, they left me alone.