On a thick green cloth that divided segments of a walkway at a UN summit, I watched an orange tussar moth sit quietly. As a ‘silent observer’ myself, the moth seemed an extension of people like us—those who are meant to take in the proceedings with a touch of distance.
This monsoon, I watched moths swarm to a light on the porch. In torchlight, their eyes shine like a tiger’s at night. In soft porchlight, they look monochromatic—as if their colours are reduced to greys and browns. We know them simply as the suicidal ‘moths to the flame’. (During power cuts in the 90s, you may remember studying by candlelight, and moths colliding with the wicks of the flame periodically, like soldiers presenting themselves for a difficult military exercise). Yet the unassuming ‘brown’ moths are multi-coloured and multi-faceted, presenting an array of curiosities and clever adaptations to the world.
In order to confound bats that hunt them, moths have evolved feathery tails which scramble bat echolocation. Many moths are active at night, having learned to navigate the dark. They pollinate flowers that open for them—you may have noticed many night-blooming flowers are white in colour. White shines in the dark, but these flowers often also have ultraviolet patterns that are invisible to us, but like beacons to moths.
Perhaps moths, more than butterflies, are the ones you share your home with. There is often a quiet moth on the windowsill, dying at the threshold of the opening in case the window doesn’t open. There may be another moth that comes in when it rains, a third that is as small as your nail.
This monsoon, I watched a little insect, encased in a ‘bag,’ climb up the wall. This is the plaster bagworm, the young of a common moth. Incredibly, it is able to digest keratin. In an otherwise sterile place, it ingests spidersilk, and our hair, completing a life cycle quietly.
On another day this month, I found a moth sitting under a leaf, biding its time till twilight. As the sun set, it would fly out, and till then it remained a silent observer. In a world full of noise, there was something to learn from that moth, and its enduring patience. India has just finished celebrating moth week, in which hundreds of citizen scientists came together to count and observe moths, and thus the world, around them.
We are so often taught to compete with everything around us, including with animals that don’t speak, that we may miss appreciating the diversity of the world around us—there are many more moth species on earth than butterflies, even though we often overlook them.
We are trained to kill and exterminate, calling everything that doesn’t look like us a ‘pest’. The quiet fortitude of an animal that evolved millions of years ago, that can look into and fly great distances, teaches us something else though: watching, observing and living quietly can also be a wholesome way to spend the years.