Quite Right Termite
The Life of The White Ant
By Maurice Maeterlinck
Translated by Alfred Sutro
If I had a mask on, especially the one that covers most of your face, I would have looked like a spy rummaging for some vital piece of information among the books in the Entomology section of the TNAU Library. Unfortunately I wasn't wearing a mask and had my allergies kick in violently soon after that but that's a different story. I was actually searching for a book on spiders and since many of the books had spines with barely legible or no lettering, I resorted to taking each one out, opening it to find the title and then putting it back. This carried on for a while until I could not put one particular book that I had pulled out back inside the rack. I pushed but the stubborn book just wouldn't go inside.
Is it the universe conspiring to have me take this book and read it? Quite possible. So I opened the same book once again to see if it was about spiders or something interesting that I had overlooked. Nope, it wasn't. In fact, the title was so general and boring that I don't even remember it now. I tried inserting it into its place but it still refused to go inside. Rearrange the books beside it - again no. Then I reached my hand inside the shelf to check what bookish spirit was behind this unnecessary book recommendation.
My fingers found a small hard book and I pulled it out. The Life of The White Ant was embossed in golden lettering on the pocket-sized notebook hardbound in a sap green cover. "Available on loan from 18.4.70." I flipped the first few pages, already liking the yellow yet firm pages and because it was the exact size of my pocketbook and found that it was about termites.
What I already know about termites:
- They are called karayaan in Tamil and deemak in Hindi.
- They love to eat up wood.
- Which is why my grandmother hates them (well she declares war on all arthropods).
- They ate up my mom's pink sari and she stitched its remainder into purses and curtains for small windows that we are still using.
- When we did pest control treatment specially for termites, I was the one who fell sick (no, I'm a human, not a termite).
- They sometimes build mounds bigger than us and our vehicles.
- They have some mechanism to keep their forts air-conditioned.
The book was first published in English in June 1927 and its Sixth Impression made its way in 1948. Copyright in the USA. Printed in Great Britain by Unwin Brothers, Ltd., Woking. Under the index, this was written:
Apart from the termites, all of this transboundary cum historical information was intriguing. There's a curious joy in reading something that has been there in the library before your parents were born and was published even before your grandparents were born. So I borrowed the book and made my way out of the library. Achchoo!
I know that a book shouldn't be judged by its cover and that books come in all shapes and sizes. But this book was so handy unlike other usually cumbersome books that it always stayed in my bag with my pocketbook and I dipped into it whenever I found time.
Sentences longer than 20 words are tedious to read, it's a fact and a thumb rule for writers. But if you ignore this while reading the book, you'll find that termites are such amazing creatures. For instance, termites build their buildings from inside and not from outside like us. And it is extremely difficult to observe them doing so because when the termites are put inside a glass box in a laboratory, they promptly render the glass walls opaque by cementing them with their reddish brown masonry. This is because they are sensitive to light and are completely blind - they spend their entire life in the darkness of the termitary. This also explains why the termite is interested only in the interior design. Add to that the size of the termitary:
Indeed, the disproportion between the work and the worker is almost incredible. An average termitary of about four yards (1 yard = 0.9144 metres) in height would correspond, on the human scale, to a building five or six hundred yards high - such as man has never attempted.
Humans share a love-hate relationship with social structure and hierarchy. We seem to be wanting to achieve a certain status and simultaneously find happiness in what we are doing. Like how Siddhartha gave up royal life and became Buddha, thereby changing his fate and many others', and numerous people fight oppression and injustice to put themselves in the palce they want to be. However, termites have a rigid and gruelling social structure. Broadly, there are workers and soldiers and then the king and the queen. Not only are their roles different but their anatomy too is matched for their respective roles. The queen is "twenty or thirty thousand times as large as the worker," and the soldiers have huge jaws to defend the termitary - such humungous jaws that they cannot eat on their own and have to be fed by the workers.
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| The only illustration in the book. |
Now this is where unforgiving nature kicks in. The workers can decide not to feed a soldier if the latter is too old for its duties and thus let it starve to death. Likewise, when faced with overpopulation problems in the termitary, the extra nymphs are gathered and "penned in separate apartments, after first having their feet clipped so as to not lose their plumpness by useless exercise, and then devoured in accordance with the needs of the community."
When someone asks me what I'm reading and I tell them that it's a book on termites, you can see the wth expressions in reply. My grandfather actually said, "How did the karayaan not devour this book! Did they realise that it's about them? The cheek!"
Yes, The Life of The White Ant also covers the termites' exploits against humans in the chapter The Devastations. Now I'm not going to give everything away except a disturbing piece of information about the author Maurice Maeterlinck. He was a Belgian playwright and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. However is has allegedly plagiarised The Life of The White Ant from Eugene Marias, an African naturalist and writer who had wide fame and had supposedly spent "ten years of hard labour in the veld" while Maeterlinck had admittedly never seen a termite in his life. Now this had me disgusted as I had decided not to judge a book by its author (read my take on Astrid Bergman Suksdorff's book). But writing a book on termites without ever setting eyes on one went a tad bit too far. "You must understand that it was not merely plagiarism of a spirit of a thing, so to speak. He has copied page after page verbally," wrote Marias in a letter to another scientist about Maeterlinck. Marias later died by suicide purportedly due to the intellectual theft of his Magnum opus.
Here I leave it open for you to decide whether or not you want to read The Life of The White Ant as it has a bloody story behind it. But if you want to have a riveting read and obviously learn what termites are up to, go for it!
And yes, if you find the spider book there while you're looking for this book, do tell me please!!
