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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
Love Bites and Brief Encounters I Pushing Boundaries in Sri Lanka
There is nothing so apparently brief as a love bite. They come when you least expect them, delivered clandestinely, as if an accomplished spy had carried out a dead-letter drop behind your unsuspecting back.
And so it is with leeches - the surrealist poets of the natural world – misunderstood, maligned and marginalised, as if waiting for some celestial starter gun to sound before they can ever be seen to exist.
During the dry, hot season, they remain utterly invisible, no more dangerous or present than miniature vampires or Krakens, waiting and wanting to wrap themselves around you.
But when the monsoon strikes and you find yourself trekking through a drenched rainforest, there they are, suddenly very present and correct, genetically accomplished acrobats dizzily throwing themselves off the undersides of leaves or stones onto your passing feet, encounters so brief as to be unnoticed.
All too often it is only much later that you discover you have had such a tryst, as I did this evening, showering my softer and more intimate body parts with rosemary-scented soap. And as I soaped myself, I found myself grappling with previously unvisited dilemmas: moral, scientific, literary tight spots of the sort you don’t really expect to find in the shower.
But you take your hurdles as they come, of course. Shower or no shower. The little leech I encountered making itself at home in so surprising a place prompted much hurried thought.
Few creatures, entities, or people have gathered so much disdain and disapprobation as has the leech. Not Darth Vader, Cinderella's stepmother, or even the Bank of Ceylon have won so much naturally occurring dislike. Or disgust. For these tiny God-made creatures also trigger a revulsion - an antipathy - that is innate. Evolutionarily, even - as if some deep, almost forgotten behavioural immune system had been awakened to issue screams, wrinkled noses, nausea, and a drop in one’s heart rate.
For, as reactions go, most people's reaction to leeches is as out of proportion as are most headlines in the London Daily Mail to the facts themselves.
But the terrible truth is that leeches are but tiny mites worthy more of wonder and gratitude than censure – whichever variety you encounter on the island.
For Sri Lanka boasts not one but two leech species.
Haemadipsa sylvestris is the rarer and larger of the two, claiming any watery space as its backyard - from here to Nepal and over to Malaysia. It grows to a mighty 40 mm in length but is just a catwalk-like minimalist 7 mm wide.
Its land-based cousin, Haemadipsa zeylanica, is even sleeker – barely 6mm in width and often no longer than 30 to 35 mm in length.
The zeylanica part of its name comes from Zeylan, the historical Dutch name for Sri Lanka, though it's no more endemic to this island than its aquatic cousin. But for those leech watchers who love a fright as much as a tickle, the horror is to be found entirely in the first part of the name – the genus bit: Haemadipsa. For in Greek, haima means "blood" and dipsa means "thirst”.
From the tiger leech of Taiwan to the mountain leech of Japan, there are over a dozen Haemadipsas, a tally which makes Sri Lanka’s offering of just two look rather modest. But they have much more to contend with in life than merely their modest species spread. Truth – or rather the lack of it – is what troubles them most.
“To the unappeased,” wrote Sylvia Plath, swapping her usual confessional tone for a more surreal one, “I sing “Pleasure is an illusion”
There is no salvation for me
But to seek the real and the unfathomed
To the Unconquered
I sing “Unconquered”
The last words of a man-made civilisation
Are the words “We are free”
In the land of your birth we will find
The truth we seek.”
For the strange truth is that even Sylvia Plath, in her search for the real and unfathomable – fails to find what is most blindingly obvious. It was a pursuit that occupied her whole life. “ I am silver and exact,” she wrote, “I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately.”
But truth is rarely that obvious. And leeches, far from being marginal horrors, are in their own quiet and compelling way, standard bearers for real freedom.
For in this challenging age of gender revaluation, of surgical interventions to reassess genitalia, taking HRT, or, more simply, changing one's clothing and presentation to realign one's gender identity, leeches are way ahead, being proudly hermaphrodites.
Within their tiny, belly-dancing, wriggling bodies, they carry both male and female reproductive systems. Their sexual equality is shamefully marvellous to humans, troubled as we are by a storm of moral, religious, biological, and social arguments about the rights and wrongs of changing gender. In a statement that might make the UN Human Rights Council sit up and take notice with admiration, all leeches become pregnant and lay eggs.
And lay they do, for they are enthusiastic breeders - a characteristic that the governments of Bulgaria, or Lithuania might be wise to note, looking as they are at a 20% decline in their populations over the next 30 years. Leeches have much to teach leaders eager to top up vote banks and stay in power.
Some leeches produce 500 eggs a year, though the Sri Lankan ones stick to a more modest 80. And they lay their eggs with the utmost care, placing about 8 eggs in a protective cocoon to help them hatch. Their potency may seem a little excessive, but given that they rarely breed more than once or twice in their entire life, they can be forgiven for doing so with such gusto.
But this is all getting a bit ahead of itself.
For the way in which leeches make love is worth pausing for.
Unlike humans, who wait with extreme reluctance before throwing off their clothes, these little creatures hang out for warm, wet weather before getting together. They then lay their eager bodies carefully down in opposite directions, head to toe as it were, to exchange sperm by pressing their gonopores – their external genital openings - together, as if kissing.
In a wonder of science that surely banishes any doubt about the creative genius of whatever god it was that made us all, both leeches swap sperm, and both fertilise their own eggs, which, when hatched, will become half-siblings of one another. What, you wonder, might bishops do with that?
Both parents place their eggs in cocoons, where they slowly grow for up to 11 months before finally hatching - so keep an eye out for these tiny, sponge-like cocoon objects hiding under a stone the next time you wander through the jungle.
With such extraordinary, beautiful, and complicated inventiveness behind their lives, how leeches could ever come to be seen as devils seems so monstrously unfair as to justify demonstrations and marches to set the record straight.
The last words of a man-made civilisation may be, as Sylvia Plath had it, “We are free”. But this is certainly not the case if you are a leech. They start – without choice - as the eternal baddies in books and film. Lemony Snicket put them centre stage in one of his Series of Unfortunate Events, attacking a boat of orphans with their razor-sharp teeth. Nathaniel Hawthorne, George R.R. Martin, the X-Men, and any number of graphic novels turn to them whenever their pages call for a little more horror and revulsion.
It is a sad fate for a species hundreds of millions of years older than the one that torments it. For the fossil record shows that leeches were doing their stuff over 400 million years ago.
Mankind’s comparable record pales somewhat in comparison.
The first human species, Homo habilis (known more fondly to palaeontologists as the handy man), dates to just 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago; home sapiens even closer – just 300,000 years.
But perhaps these many hundreds of millions of passing years helped humans, for the earliest leeches were thought not to suck blood but to swallow aquatic animals whole.
By the time our ancestors evolved sufficiently to get picky about how revolting leeches were, the little creatures had settled down to merely sucking blood.
And here, of course, is where it all gets really tricky. Who is this plant here planet for? Us? Other species? Men from Mars? Ants and octopi?
Animal rights are a cause for much alarm.
The papacy recently opined that dogs have the ultimate rights. "One day,” said Pope Francis, “we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all God's creatures." In this regard, Rameses III, the Egyptian pharaoh of 1198 BCE, had already made it there long before the Pope, buried with his favourite dog, Kami, who was equipped with the ritual scrolls needed for his own entrance into paradise.
Not everyone agrees. Sri Lanka is currently overcoming a wave of shock at Anglican churches that have held special pet-blessing ceremonies.
Leeches lack the emotional pulling power of dogs, yet like dogs, or indeed like you or me, are made by the same great factory.
Fond arguments for leech rights are unlikely to succeed if founded on their cuteness.
So it might be best to turn to an alternative literary hero in trying to understand the rightful place of leeches in society today.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” wrote Walt Whitman, a poet much given to the little and most real realities of life, “And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
And if not him, then why not leeches?
As Whitman himself noted, “every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,” is an evolutionary path no different from that of any other animal.
No one has a kind word to say about leeches – for them, as Aesop knew, kindness is a language that the deaf can hear, and the blind can see. If Whitman had known this before writing his famous poem, he might have phrased things a little more inclusively.
But history has left it to the medical profession, rather than poets and writers, to make the real value of leeches known – even if that value is calculated only in relation to their expediency to mankind.
For doctors, a leech is something of a best friend. Ancient Egyptian funerary paintings from 3500 years ago show how skilled medics were using them in medical procedures. No year has gone by since that wasn't the case.
Zoom forward 3,400 years to 19th-century Europe, and you encounter a wave of leech mania, with leeches imported to treat a host of different ailments. In just one year, France imported over 40 million of them.
Doctors today still use them; indeed, they rely entirely on them in reconstructive surgery to relieve blood congestion in tissues, limbs, fingers, ears, and skin flaps that have just been attached. For leeches are in fact the ultimate precision tool.
Surgeons find it very hard to reconnect the smallest and most delicate veins after surgery, and the consequent buildup of congested blood can negate the entire operation. But leeches draw out this excess and save the new tissue from dying.
But they do much more. As they feed, they inject a natural blood thinner that stops blood from clotting prematurely so it can flow better through the reconnected veins. Other proteins in their saliva dilate blood vessels to help circulation continue even after the bite has ended. And their saliva contains – most thoughtfully - a mild numbing agent so that the bite is almost never felt.
Should you get nibbled on your jungle walk, whatever else you do, do not pull the little wriggler off. It has attached itself to you with strong muscular suction pads that anchor in its three jaws and tiny teeth. Pulling it off leaves part of its anatomy in your skin, which makes the itching or irritation worse.
Instead, use soap to tease them off you - as you might caress a passing kitten. Like a poached egg on Sunday, the fat little creature will implode gently, causing you not the faintest bother.
All you need do is be glad you ever encountered them. For in the meeting you have pushed just a little more into those remarkable territories beyond the boundaries of your known world. And left yourself in search of something more deserving to scream at.