Tattaiya
He saw her on a Monday afternoon, moments before the clock struck two. A terrible time, really, to see a wasp in your balcony. Worse, if your balcony has an empty socket where a ceiling fan or light should have been. But Ravi didn’t make the connection immediately. He was sitting on a folding chair and looking out through the sliding door, his arms resting on a broad plywood desk, the laptop in front of him commanding exactly zero per cent of his attention. His eyes, dark brown and a little glazed over, were following her along the metal railing with vague interest rooted mostly in boredom. He had chosen this particular corner of his living room to set up a workstation because it was the closest he could get to the outdoors without having to wear a mask.
After a full round of the railing, she flew down to the floor and began to slide along its surface. It looked almost like she was inspecting it, gauging the quality of the tiles. If he spoke wasp, he would have told her it’s the cheap stuff. Nothing to buzz home about. But he couldn’t speak wasp, which also meant that he couldn’t ask her what she wanted with his balcony anyway. Sure, it was springtime and flowers were, undoubtedly, blooming somewhere. But Mercury Towers was no natural paradise. He could count on one hand the trees he could see from where he was sitting, which was the only part of his one-bedroom apartment that had any trees within sight at all. If a weed-infested square of land qualified as a kind of wilderness then there was one across the road from the main gate. That was much more her vibe, he thought. Then why was she here?
As if in response to his question, she veered toward the glass and remained suspended in mid-air for a few seconds, bobbing gently in the March breeze. Ravi would later swear to his mother on the phone that she spent that time looking directly at him, sizing him up. She then began to fly in slow, lilting loops around the balcony. It took him a few seconds to notice that the loops were becoming steadily smaller – she was circling systematically closer to the empty socket above. He looked on with mounting horror as she drew closer and closer, skillfully dodging the stray wires poking out of the socket’s mouth, and disappeared inside.
*
Ravi went into the 2.15 Zoom call with a lot on his mind. Lockdowns, travel bans, scrambling for basic ration, social distancing, working from home, and now this. Why did God hate him? This was a question he asked often. It would slide into his consciousness during a call like this one – really meant for two people but with the entire team of eleven present, on mute, just in case. His brain would then play a highlight reel of the worst choices he had made during the last two years. Leaving a great job as a sales executive in Chandigarh for a marketing gig in Delhi. Stocking up on 20-stick packs of Marlboro Red to oil superiors instead of doing actual work. Choosing a run-down apartment at the edge of the city to save on rent, not realising the commute would cost a quarter of his salary until the lockdown stopped time and demanded a quarter of his sanity instead. Even on his own – especially on his own – five smoke breaks a day for 30 days a month had amounted to a lot of cigarettes and a disgusting habit he couldn’t kick.
The 2.15 call melted into the 2.45 call, an hour-long virtual seminar on mental wellness. The battle at hand was summarised with a compelling graphic – a colossal green coronavirus towering over a tiny, anthropomorphised brain wearing boxing gloves and a smile. In between anxious glances at the socket, Ravi stared absently at the slides blinking on his screen. External stressors: Information, Illness, Death. Internal stressors: Fear, Paranoia, Despair. Could she have snuck out when he wasn’t looking? Meditation Techniques to Clear Your Mind. Maybe she had flown away after all. The Art of Positive Thinking. There was, of course, no way to be sure. How Much News is Too Much News? What could she possibly be doing in there?
He spent the rest of the afternoon pretending to work while his mind wandered continuously to the wasp, who may or may not have been conspiring against him in the darkness of her new lair. It was time to ask the Internet for help. His hands hovered above the keyboard while he agonised over search terms.
How-to-drive-wasps-out-of-your-home
A battery of beekeeping services came up, all of them in the United States.
How-to-drive-wasps-out-of-your-home-India
Local results, but about honeybees.
How-to-prevent-wasp-hives-India
Do wasps build hives?
How-to-prevent-wasp-nests-India
The search results were unanimous on the obvious solution – cover any crevices or holes. Ravi groaned. He was clearly going about this the wrong way. Maybe the first step was to know what, or who, he was up against. His hands were hovering above the keyboard again when his phone rang.
‘Mumma, can I call you later? I’m sort of in the middle of something.’
‘Are they making you work late again?’
‘Na, I have bigger problems.’
‘Oh God, did you test positive?!’
‘Arey no! Why would you jump straight to that? It’s wasps. Wasp. Singular. In my balcony. I seriously cannot afford an infestation right now.’
‘What kind of wasp?’
‘One of those nasty yellow ones. Ooh, do you remember from school, when I was in class 8 or something? That gigantic hive outside my classroom window? They would buzz about the corridors in gangs, like they owned the place, stinging kids left right and center.’
‘Oh, tattaiya? Those are the worst, and they come fast. If you saw one today, she’ll come back with friends tomorrow.’
The notion of multiple wasps swarming his balcony was too much. Promising to call in the morning, he disconnected with a hurried good night. Tattaiya. What was an English name for this that Google would understand?
Wasp-species-Delhi
Honeybees again.Delhi-yellow-wasp-species
More honeybees.
T-A-T-T-A-I-Y-A
And there she was, peering menacingly out of a thumbnail. Yellow paper wasp. The more he read, the more it all made sense. The cycle begins in spring with a ‘foundress’, one article said, who scopes out neighborhoods for crevices. Once she has found one, she starts to construct a nest alone, or with other females. She builds cell by cell until it is big enough to accommodate her first eggs. Another article said that these eggs hatch into an army of female worker wasps, who then take charge of the remaining construction. Diving deep into the inevitable wormhole, Ravi eventually found an encyclopedia that described how tattaiyas feed caterpillars that would have become Common Mormon butterflies, to their larvae. What a band of murderers. Something had to be done, and quickly.
He gathered everything he needed before going to bed – his thickest white bedsheet, a mop, a roll of electrical tape, a single Marlboro Red stick, a matchbox, a folding ladder, and a sheaf of unread newspapers. The weapon was assembled at dawn. He attached the cigarette to the tip of the mop’s handle with three rounds of tape and set it alight using a match. Holding the mop aloft, handle-side-up, he stepped into the balcony with the bedsheet pulled over his head, like a ghostly bride performing a bizarre new ritual. He raised the cigarette to the socket, stopping just short of the wires, and let the smoke curl into its mouth. If the tattaiya was inside, she would be outside soon enough.
After about a minute, the smoke began to curl back out. When no tattaiya emerged with it, retching and gasping for air, Phase 2 was set in motion immediately. Ravi unfolded the ladder slowly, trying not to wake any neighbors, and placed it below the socket. Tucking last week’s Sunday Times under his arm, he climbed to a step high enough for him to reach the hole. He tore off the first two pages of the edition and crumpled them aggressively in his hands until he was holding a tennis ball-sized lump of white and black. This he then stuffed into the socket, making sure not to leave any gaps. Mission accomplished.
The 9 am Zoom call was wonderful, mostly because he was too pleased with himself to notice otherwise. He looked out at his perfectly vacant balcony, basking in a beautiful, sunny spring day. There was a bounce in his step each time he went out for a smoke break, a stroll, or just to breathe in the sweet scent of victory. He was more cheerful than he had been in a year, and the hours flew by like so many tattaiyas until it was lunchtime. The early start to his day had given him the time to cook himself a real meal. He sat on his chair, holding a plate of rajma-chawal, and waited for the foundress to return.
When she did, she came with a friend, just like his mother had said, and the two wasps went straight for the socket. Finding a paper blockade where the entrance to their new home should have been, they began to look for any openings in the crumpled mass that might let them through. Ravi watched them inspect every inch of the newspaper and begin to panic. He spooned some rice into his mouth. They zoomed around the balcony in obvious distress. One of them flew directly at the sliding door, making him pull back instinctively as though she might come hurtling at him through the glass. They seemed, finally, to have understood what had happened and who was to blame.
This went on until dusk. The wasps gave up when the sky began to darken. Ravi was still at his desk, determined to hold his position for as long as they did. When they disappeared into the evening, he felt none of the jubilation he had been hoping for. He felt, instead, like a geyser was erupting inside him, projecting troubling questions up to his brain. Why had the tattaiyas stayed around for so long? There were so many crevices in this concrete jungle that they were hilariously spoilt for choice. They could have moved on to a better, more welcoming spot. Why did they fixate on this one socket for hours?
The geyser then threw up the most troubling question of all – what if a tattaiya was still inside the socket? He had assumed that one of the two tattaiyas buzzing around the balcony was the foundress. But he couldn’t be sure, right? What if they were two new tattaiyas entirely, and the foundress was still trapped inside? He had seen her enter the socket but had not, after all, seen her leave. He closed his eyes and went over the morning’s events. The smoke, surely, would have made her come out? Unless she was too frightened to move. When he had plugged the hole with the newspaper, had she allowed him to bury her alive?
He did his best to dismiss these thoughts as manifestations of the irrational part of his brain. Had he simply stuffed the paper into the socket without first trying to smoke her out, things would be different. What he had done instead was give her a clean, legitimate exit. His conscience was clear.
But try as he might, the notion that she was up there looking for a way out of total darkness, refused to leave him. He went to bed early and found that sleep just wouldn’t come, no matter how desperately he begged for it. Why did God hate him? Lying on his bed, he looked up through the window at a round patch of starless sky, guarded on all sides by the high-rises of Mercury Towers. Its impenetrable blackness reminded him of the socket and everything inside him squirmed uncomfortably. When he finally did sleep, he dreamed of the tattaiya, drowning in a sea of newsprint.
*
Ravi woke up while it was still dark, and paced the living room for what felt like hours. As soon as the sky brightened a little, he carried the ladder into the balcony, climbed up, yanked the newspaper out of the socket, and tapped the wall sharply with his palm. When she didn’t come out, he came back down and sat cross-legged on the ground, looking up. After several minutes of nothing happening, he climbed up again and thrust his right hand into the socket. Feeling his way around carefully, he pulled out only when he was certain there was no tattaiya inside, alive or otherwise. He couldn’t bring himself to return the newspaper to the socket, and came back down with it clutched in his left hand. The sky was now a bright blue and the sun was rising on one side, splashing it with strokes of egg yolk yellow. Ravi sank to the ground and, for reasons he would never fully understand, began to cry, his sobs drifting from tower to tower, echoing in the morning silence.