JAYANT KASHYAP

Annotations on Microbes

^i. say ‘microorganisms’: reared, say ‘nurtured’, say ‘borne and looked after’

^ii. like baby humans, like dogs and kittens, or birds—tiny, invisible babies

^iii. fed potato juice and agar agar and glucose and yeast and salt—say ‘NaCl’—and whatnot

^iv. even blood and ‘blood heated to 80 degrees Celsius’—say ‘chocolate’-like

^v. (warm and dark brown, unlike blood)—and kept in ‘controlled environment’, say

^vi. in a cozy manner:

^vii. a cot looked after hour-after-hour, sometimes for weeks to observe

^viii. little blobs on the surface of Petri plates, and closely-

^ix. noticed to assure an absence of ‘contamination’—say invasion,

^x. say ‘nothing must hurt what needs looking after’—say small infants

^xi. kept at 28 degrees or 37 degrees or 42 degrees for proper growth, say

^xii. 4 degrees to keep from ‘overgrowth’, from (again) ‘contamination’—since fungi take over

^xiii. colonies and, when incorrectly maintained, even plates—say a ‘colonialist

^xiv. regime’—say focussed on acquiring and not adapting—and yet, say ‘still

^xv. some microbes are resilient’—say ‘I once saw a Petri dish

^xvi. filled with fungi (imagine a small football ground with a white-and-black mat)

^xvii. except in places where the bacterial colonies had already appeared’—

^xviii. say ‘conjured’ themselves out of thin air—so, much

^xix. like babies, say ‘[most microbes

^xx. are fastidious and] some microbes are still resilient,

^xxi. despite the [overbearing, say ‘ominous’] presence of fungi, that is’—