Like many of us, Deepa Padmanaban despised cockroaches. “I didn’t mind lizards, but could not stand the sight of cockroaches,” says the Bengaluru-based author and journalist. However, when she started researching cockroaches for her lately launched ebook, Invisible Housemates: The Secret Lives of Monkeys, Geckos, Pigeons, and Other Creatures We Live With, she discovered herself intrigued by them, particularly by their intelligence. “Scientists have tried to train them to go through mazes,” she says. Also, they’ve a chemical signature, by means of which they will recognise their siblings from their non-siblings, says Deepa, who discovered her perspective on cockroaches altering as she found extra about them.
The cockroach is one of 13 animals featured on this ebook, which explores the lives of creatures that inhabit and encompass our properties by means of the prism of each tradition and science. From the advantages provided by sharing your house with a tiny home gecko to how pigeons, as we speak thought of as flying rats, had been as soon as valued as feathered couriers, and our difficult relationship with sparrows, monkeys, and frogs, Invisible Housemates encourages us to see many of these animals in a considerably totally different gentle. “Every being we share our home with has something to teach us about not just ourselves, but also humanity and civilisation, pop culture and history, science and myth,” states the ebook’s blurb.
Author Deepa Padmanaban at her ebook launch in Bengaluru
| Photo Credit:
Rashmi Swamy
Genesis
Deepa, an environmental journalist who has written extensively about wildlife conservation, human-wildlife interactions, and battle, says that the thought for the ebook started along with her ideas on human interactions with urban wildlife. “I had written a bit about snakes in and around our houses, and how we respondto that. So, somewhere, this thought about how we humans perceive and interact with all these other organisms that live in and around our houses came in,” she says.
While many of these animals are perceived as pests or just missed, “they have a huge role to play in our ecosystem,” she says, stating that few folks hassle finding out or attempting to know them. “We might just lose them if we don’t pay attention,” she says. “That was the seed of the idea: looking at all these amazing creatures that live around us.”
The concept was to give attention to human interactions with these animals, “not just everyday interaction, but I was also curious to see how they were perceived in history, literature, mythology and pop culture,” she says of the ebook, which additionally, of course, seems at these animals by means of the lens of science.
A squirrel on the department of an Ashoka tree
Her writer, she says, initially requested her to give you a listing of ten species. “I first thought of the creatures that live in proximity to us and with whom we have a love-hate relationship (mostly hate!),” she says, itemizing some of them: geckos, spiders, cockroaches, rats, pigeons, crows and sparrows. “I also included squirrels and frogs as these were in abundance in my neighbourhood when I first moved to Bangalore, but have now declined or vanished,” she says. Also, monkeys, “a new entrant to our neighbourhood, causing some distress to people,” says Deepa, who later added ants, mosquitoes and bees to the listing. “The idea was to highlight our dynamic relationship with these creatures while also showcasing some of their unique traits.”
Shifting perceptions
When Deepa started engaged on the ebook a number of years in the past, she additionally began transferring away from these animals merely by means of “a human-centric lens.” This is clear in Invisible Housemates, wherein she additionally highlights the distinctive traits these creatures possess and the variations amongst people of the identical species. This sense of surprise, which she conveys fantastically to the reader, prompts you to consider what number of of these animals have “been here before humans, and, of course, some of them have evolved along with us.”
Even mosquitoes have a job to play in our ecosystem
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
It can also be an try to maneuver away from a conservation narrative that focuses on megafauna in wild locations. Small animals that inhabit urban areas additionally play an essential function in ecosystem functioning, she says. “We, humans, are always trying to control the populations around us, for our own convenience,” she says, providing examples of these interventions going unsuitable. In 1958, for example, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China advocated the large-scale killing of sparrows, a call that led to a surge of insect pests within the nation. “The sparrows were eating these worms that damaged the crops, so when the sparrow populations declined, the worms proliferated. That, along with some other factors, led to famine,” says Deepa.
Other examples of how these small animals contribute to the well-being of ecosystems embody squirrels aiding in forest regeneration and seed dispersal by burying their nuts and seeds for future use, cockroaches breaking down natural matter and contributing to soil fertility, and rats’ burrows serving to to aerate the soil.
Monkeys typically reside in shut affiliation with people
| Photo Credit:
VENKATACHALAPATHY_C
Quoting from the ebook Mosquitopia: The Place of Pests in a Healthy World, by creator and professor of historical past Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Deepa says, “Since humans accidentally enabled the growth of mosquitoes, are they justified in their efforts to control these mosquitoes and even seek to eradicate them?” This quote, she says, captures how human beings have tried to regulate animals, typically seeing them as nuisances that have to be eradicated. And but, “each of these has a role—even mosquitoes help with pollination—but we don’t always look at the full picture,” she explains. “While I don’t advocate that we encourage having the pest species in our homes, I wanted to highlight that, before we eradicate these creatures, we need to think about how our actions can affect the environment we live in.”
Published – September 29, 2025 04:40 pm IST
