Human beings are creatures who choose to live how they want, and can change their
circumstances. Human nature has the ability to make life as it wills, creating the picture of what it means to exist. When I was eight years of age, I had a friend, a grasshopper. I went to meet it often. Neither of us said anything. It would always be on my hand or on a leaf as if it had been waiting for me to come all day. One morning, when I went to the garden, I did not find it. As I looked around the garden I wondered if it had gone away. When I didn’t find it, I told my mother and she said “He has died”. When I asked her why I couldn’t find it, she said “We can bury it in the garden using leaves and dirt.”
Many years later, there was a news of locust swarms around the world. While reading about these swarms, I read that, in the rains particularly, in arid lands, grasshoppers can begin to transform into locusts and gather in swarms. I wondered about the locust, thinking if my friend had turned into one.

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Ritwik is a writer and actor. He has acted in a couple of plays, and has been published in the journals Kitaab, Countercurrents, Zeno Press Magazine, RIC Journal, and Indian Ruminations, as well as an anthology ‘A Map Called Home’ published by Kitaab. He is the untitled equivalent of a human.