Written by John Briggs   

Early February, Seawind on Kappil Beach, Kerala
Tourist signs declaiming it to be “God’s Country” notwithstanding, sunny Kerala has its perils: riptides, falling coconuts, "tuskers" in the streets, multiple varieties of cobras and other poisonous snakes, thumb-sized cockroaches, tuk-tuk and bus drivers and a long list of venomous spiders, some of which jump and one whose bite, according to an Internet naturalist with no academic credentials listed, causes a victim to “bleed from every orifice” within minutes of being bitten. It’s prudent to look under the bed and shake out the covers before settling in for the night.
I’ve become most familiar with the ants. The ones in my house come in several sizes and colors. The most interesting ones are brown and small: the size of the tiny top and bottom crosshatches on my MacBook’s cursor.
As I write on a sunny January afternoon, a thin stream is moving across the opposite wall, from the window ledge southwest to the baseboard, then due west. It’s a tiny-brown-ant main highway--mostly four-lane north and south but bubbling out, this being India, to six or eight lanes at times.
A couple of nights ago, having just finished Heart of Darkness and being at loose ends, I could find only a done-in moth at the end of the highway, already stripped of color but being moved for its remaining calories into the ants’ cupboard, so I put a peanut on the window ledge. How long would it take the ants to find it? And what would they do with it?
It took just a minute. One ant left the highway and circled the nut, then another. In a few minutes perhaps 10 or 12 were on it or circling, though the traffic on the highway didn’t slacken. I had expected more. More action, quicker.
I broke a section of a namkeen-spiced Cheetos Puff onto the sill: a bright yellow target made with Real Cheez. That caused a stir. The entire highway veered immediately toward the Puff and the ants covered it. Meanwhile, the select, small crew continued its desultory work on the peanut.
I lost interest and went to bed.
In the morning, I remembered. The peanut was gone, but the piece of Cheetos remained. More exactly, something Cheetos-shaped and Cheetos-sized remained, but it was pale. The ants had taken the color and presumably all within that was edible, leaving a husk behind and confirming what mothers have always said: “Cheetos aren’t food!”
But what are they? What is that husk, that inert piece of dry fluff that even these ants won’t eat?
It’s puzzling. They are voracious. Before I learned, I lost a Snickers bar to them. I put it incautiously on the table, and they bored a pinhole through the wrapper in minutes. When I pulled it open, expecting a chocolate treat, I found the bar swarming with chocolate-faced ants.
I bought a new jar of Mellow Peanut Butter, an excellent spread from Trivandrum. The ants got into it before I opened it, beneath the metal cap and through the foil seal inside. I was barely in time. Only eight or ten were actually swimming in the surface oil. I made them leave.
Alerted to the menace, I put a package of unopened crackers in a safe place—an eight-inch wooden spike protruding inexplicably but conveniently from the bedroom wall six feet above my bed. I dropped the unopened crackers in a plastic bag and hung the bag from the spike, making sure it didn’t touch the wall. That fooled them for nearly a full day, yesterday and this morning, but I glanced that way an hour ago and saw a thin trail of the little ants descending from the ceiling, and I could see them on the spike. I looked inside the bag. Thousands. They had eaten through the outer foil packaging of the crackers and then through the inner plastic wrap. I fed the crackers to the pye dog lying in the yard, who ignored the ants.
Though I've sprayed at times (a pleasant-smelling formula called Good Knight), I admire my little companions. They are as dedicated as their human bretheren in insurance companies and media conglomerates. They are an incentive to brush up crumbs, and they let nothing go to waste.
I found a small triton sea shell the other day washed up, the dead animal inside, and put it by my porch. The ants built a hill over it and stripped out the animal within hours.
They are occasionally a nuisance, as when they eat a Snickers or find crumbs near a bare foot, for though they’re tiny, they bite. I think they must ambush the spiders and moths I see being borne off as in an old safari movie, and I think without exaggeration that if a suspected non-lemming were cheneyed by NSA thugs and strapped to a table, the ants in this house alone would leave nothing but shiny bones behind in a day or two.
I am likely breathing too much the air of India, but as I pondered the hollow Puff on my window sill I was reminded of our Real Cheez capital and the bipedal feeder-ants there—dealers with buffed nails and good creases and fraternity grins. They leave us as window-dressing the inert dry fluff of official Washington.
And we eat it.