A sweet spicy bitter morning

I am a stink bug and my home is in a ten year old Pandanus tree. Me and my family and friends have lived here for several generations. Since you might be interested in taxonomic details that hardly matter to us, I belong to the family Pentatomidae of the order Hemiptera and have stuck a picture to this story, so you know who tells this story. This story is a sad one, its about how I die. I had lived long enough though; four weeks, yet I never knew the end would be this crimson. My folks had forewarned me about this, they had lost a good many friends of theirs this way, yet they said that when this happens theres nothing much one can do but accept it as bitter fate.



This January morning in the Upper Siang nestled among the jagged mountains at the edge of the country in the Arunachal Pradesh State began cold, much colder than other days. Sunlight barely managed to pierce the surface of the clouds above the Siang river. With the backdrop of several forested mountains gently being caressed by some of these clouds, it was indeed a beautiful day. The sap of the Pandanus today was very sweet, so me and others kept drinking. It was too early to drink yet, there was nothing much else to do, was a cold moist day.

From a gap in the leaves of the Pandanus tree, I saw three people, one of them looked like he wasn't from the village. While we often do see people walking in the forest, this time it felt different, since one of them was hacking down the Pandanus tree opposite ours. And it took him barely a couple minutes to bring it down.



After bringing it down, two of them shouted to each other 'bajako tari duné' and started collecting the stink bugs they found between the leaves of the Pandanus. Seeing this left me a little bitter since my folks had told me that the tree took 12 years to grow that old and I had no idea what they would do to my kin they were collecting. But wait, there's another hacking down the tree I am on too!



In a minute, I was face to face with this man. He picked me and many others up and held us within his clenched fists while searching for more of us. Then, he packed us all up within a leaf and I could hear him walk to a place farther away. I had no idea what he was upto but this sure felt like the end for us.



Few minutes later I heard them having their lunch and soon I along with few others was popped into his mouth, a moist tobacco flavoured saliva covered me and I was crushed with his huge teeth. I struggled for a short while, and as a last resort I let out a spicy chemical hoping that would sting his mouth and he would chuck me out alive. That didn't work too and here I will have to end my story.

Ptero's story – as told by a Jack tree

It was an uncanny place to land on, no leaf litter, no shade, very little grass, not much moisture in the soil, and even no kin around, unlike places it had visited earlier. It was April, almost peak summer. Ptero, a seed was drifting with the wind for the last few days to finally land on a tree-less clearing, a very uncommon place in the vast stretches of forests in the surroundings. It wasn't just any field and it wasn't just any seed. This field was cultivated annually by the villagers for about fifty years as were several other fields located within Bhadra Tiger Reserve in South India and then one day people left. There was a voluntary relocation programme by the Forest Department and few non-governmental organisations and 14 villages were relocated to outside the sanctuary to make way for the forest, for it to grow back and engulf these clearings.

Ptero was exhausted with almost broken wings, it had travelled far completing its half-a-km journey from its parent Pterocarpus marsupium tree to Madla clearing in a week, and was cursing its luck for landing in what seemed like a hostile environment. To make matters worse, at night, rodents were all over the clearing looking for seeds they could feed on. Luckily, they were looking for large seeds full of nutrition such as Terminalia bellerica, Spondias mangifera, Melia dubia and left skinny Ptero alone. But Ptero had heard, sometimes they pick up skinny seeds too, when other fruits are not available.

The people who earlier lived inside Bhadra were quite resourceful, for cultivation they only cleared forest adjoining the Somavahini river and other streams, to facilitate irrigation of their fields. So after a month's wait, Ptero was pleased, the showers began, the fields were inundated and there was plenty of water and sunshine. So, in delight, Ptero germinated and lo we have a seedling in the clearing. Through the next nine months, Ptero grew to about half a meter and looking at the adjoining clearing that was carpeted by a 1-m tall growth of Chromolaena odorata, an invasive weed, was glad it landed here or it wouldn't have stood a chance. There were hardly any tree seedlings under this Chromolaena carpet. That's when a group of about fifty spotted deer visited the clearing, nibbling at every fresh growth there was. Thankfully a bunch of prickly shrubs near Ptero prevented them from having a bite at it, and Ptero was happy to stay alive.

There was however another problem, the next monsoon was a major downpour and Ptero lay submerged under water hoping for some sunlight, for a whole month. It had almost died when its buds finally saw some sunlight. And then days got better, there was enough water, moisture in the soil and sunlight for the next three months when Ptero transformed into a sapling 1-m tall. Now, neither the rains nor the harsh sun can stop it from growing. Thats when it heard the thud of elephants passing through, trampling everything in their way, but thankfully they passed a couple metres away from our sapling and Ptero lives to tell.

One bright morning, two human beings were walking in Ptero's field. They carried umbrellas and wore brown and green coloured clothes as if that makes them difficult to spot. It was drizzling and every twenty minutes they would take few steps, stop to discuss, write down something on paper, look here and there and take photographs of other seedlings and saplings in the clearing. Then, they came to Ptero, and one of them was like “wow, this one made it!” and the other told him, “Honney gida” (Pterocarpus marsupium sapling). They put a tape from the ground to Ptero's head and said “110 cm” and Ptero smiled as they took a photo of him.

That's Ptero's story and it will hopefully tell us in the future the story of its journey till it became a 30 m tall tree, slightly taller than myself, standing tall in the beautiful forests of Bhadra.