Keya Sarkar: Season of the sensual poka

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

One of the most difficult things for me to get used to once I shifted to Santiniketan from Mumbai, strangely enough, were the insects. Now after five years of being here I have got used to the seasonality of insect life here. But initially they would take me by surprise every time.

Those that come only when the mango trees are flowering, those that emerge when it's about to rain, those that go for the lights every evening, only to die the next morning, those that appear on the walls, it seems to me, when the geckos wish to party: are nameless insects that nature gets you intimate with.

Of the many close encounters that I have had with these tiny cohabitants, I recall some as pleasant and others not so much. Probably the worst was only a few days after I shifted base. It was the month of March and the mornings were still pleasant. After the restrictive apartment of Mumbai, I loved the smell of the garden here. And the sheer visual delight of watching the morning sun touch the tip of every leaf before moving on. But that day as I stood talking to my gardener, I felt a sudden sting in my left eye. I reckoned it was some kind of insect attack but decided not to panic. But very soon my eye began to hurt and I felt a swelling. When I looked in the mirror I was horrified. The white of my eye had protruded to give my eye a kind of a doughnut appearance. My gardener was cool. It is only a poka, he said. He told me to splash some water and said it would subside. It did.

The more pleasant experiences are with fireflies. On new moon nights when the electricity board is conserving power and there are long bouts of load shedding, it is the firefly which entertains us as we sit in the verandah. Even when we are tucked inside our mandatory mosquito nets at night, we have a few of them hovering in the room giving us our very own disco strobes.

But all these pale in comparison to my most recent encounter. As I work now in textiles "" weaving, dyeing and fabricating "" I started a small retail outlet. Over the last four years my clientele has grown and I have had to shift into bigger premises. Tucked inside a bylane of a residential area, our store has no large hoardings or signs on the way for potential customers to find us.

Many a customer has complained that we are too low key and very difficult to find. Paying heed to these suggestions, we thought of placing a mannequin at the door of the shop which would make it easier for those looking for the shop to locate it as also be an indication for those not exactly looking for it.

The ironsmith was quite surprised at my request of a mannequin. Although he had made many props for our store, this was certainly a first. Anyway I drew out what I wanted and he was absolutely brilliant in his execution. We dressed her up in great enthusiasm and placed her in front of the door. While she got a change of dress every day in the beginning, it became once a week as our enthusiasm waned.

But from February we noticed something rather odd. Every shirt or top that was put on the model would get holes right at the nipples. The first one was odd; the second one was passed off as a coincidence but the third time had us worried. We hung naphthalene balls inside the shirt but to no avail. Whatever insect was going for it was outsmarting us and we ended up having a heap of shirts with two holes you know where!

So we decided to let it be. If customers are a trifle surprised at a mannequin with a torn shirt welcoming them at the door they are keeping mum about it. We do not have a choice but to wait for the season of the sensual poka to pass.