Sights, never fading out of memory

Leafing through the pages of a newspaper edition dated June 24, 2019, a headline caught my attention, “Rajasthan border villages hit by locust swarm invasion.”

The story took me back to the early years of the 1960s when I was in Agra, as a technical supervisor at a metal factory.

Going around the machines in my workplace, suddenly I saw the shadow of a dark cloud passing over our hangar, plunging the area into darkness on that bright morning.

Quite curious, I stepped out of the hangar and looked up.

I was met with the bizarre sight of millions of small insects flying close together in one direction, just above the hangar. It was only when I drew near when a precious few of them dropped down, that I could identify as big, green grasshoppers, flecked red with long slender legs and wafer-thin wings.

Within minutes I noticed some of my colleagues around me watching the strange sight eyes with their mouth agape. I had observed such colourful grasshoppers earlier as well, mostly on a plant. They are called calotropis gigantea, and are abundant in bushes. I had never witnessed a multitude of them migrating.

That was the first and till then the only time I ever witnessed in reality what I had only read about in dailies. The ‘locust swarms’ usually migrate from place to place and descend on fields with crops and destroy them almost instantly.

News about the havoc that locusts wreck is now almost absent as the survival of the species has become difficult due to pesticides.

Some two years later , I landed a more lucrative job at a steel industry in Kanpur as a Senior Supervisor. A bachelor of twenty-seven years, I stayed with two of my office colleagues in a roomy bedsit on the outskirts of the city.

Our accommodation was close to a vast field enclosed within barbed-wire fencing.

Once during a pitch dark night, I chanced upon the sight of brilliant sparkles across the field. The next morning I anxiously entered the field. A close look at the crops revealed the presence of fireflies on the sesame plants.

Such amazing sights that send down the path of reminiscence, remain in our memory and revisit us after decades whenever we are reminded of their occurrence through word of mouth, print or social media.