A butterfly story
Write something beautiful, I was told. About butterflies, for
example, I was advised. I am not sure if I was being asked to write
beautiful or write beautifully. I don’t set out to do either. I can,
however, write about butterflies, although I cannot guarantee ‘beauty’,
in description or shapes crafted by word choice.
Butterflies remind me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel ‘One Hundred
Years of Solitude’ and the incidental character Mauricio Babilonia who
was always followed by yellow butterflies. Babilonia has an affair with
Renata Remedios, better known as Meme, and gets shot on the orders of
the girl’s mother who claims he’s a chicken thief. He is paralyzed and
is bedridden for the rest of his solitary life, while Meme rebels by
going silent, leaving her mother to take care of the issue of their
surreptitious liaison.
Yellow butterflies take me to the world of Marquez’ Macondo and that
particularly eloquent rendering of Latin American history as some have
argued. I see a yellow butterfly and the characters, their
eccentricities, pathos, craziness, triumphs, love affairs and
memory-laden longevity dance before me. Or maybe it’s ‘within me’, I am
not sure.
Adam’s Peak
Butterflies also take me to a story in the Grade two Sinhala
textbook. Back then, we had to buy school textbooks. I loved smelling
those books. Fresh-book-smell is one of my earliest and most enduring
memories. The books were purchased a few weeks before the new school
term began and I would read all the stories in the Sinhala and English
texts. This particular story was about Samanala Kanda, also called
Adam’s Peak (but not, one notes, ‘Aadamge Kanda’) and how butterflies in
their thousands make a ‘pilgrimage’ to the peak held sacred by those of
all faiths, and perish.
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Butterflies
- one of the nature’s gifts |
It is a butterfly story I’ve re-related to my daughter. This was when
she was two or three years old. That was a time when I had to make up
new stories all the time and not being very creative in crafting tales,
I would usually do spins on stories I already knew. It so happened that
there was a small butterfly flitting around and that sparked memory. It
was easy after that to talk about the butterflies, their shapes and
sizes; the butterfly pilgrimage, the possibility of straying and getting
lost, the ways of returning to fold and path, and to describe the
journey and the landscapes the butterfly thousands travelled across.
Magnificent and magical
Butterfly, then, was a kind of code word or key that opened doors to
world’s real and imagined, magnificent and magical. It was a time-lock
opener that took me to Grade two and the fragrance of a fresh textbook
and a story therein so I could hold my child’s hand, not as father but
as friend, a fellow-inquirer as inquisitive and as ready to be
spell-bound by narratives whose truth value was not questioned.
She knows more about butterflies now than I do, for she is a keen
observer of her surroundings, the insects and birds, the work of worms
and the destruction of pests. She is scared of frogs for some reason but
is ok with butterflies. I’ve heard that someone once said that when the
first child laughed for the first time, it broke into a thousand pieces
and went tripping along happily and that this was the beginning of
fairies. If the first child’s first laugh did break up in this manner,
than I think it is more likely that it was the beginning of butterflies
and not fairies, but that’s my personal opinion. I think that it is also
possible that there must have been a child whose first smile was
butterfly-birthed.
Fragile wings
When innocence caresses innocence it is now fire that is produced, it
is augmented innocence. That’s a land that does not require visa or any
other form of permission to visit.
Maybe we don’t visit it often enough. Maybe we’ve forgotten that it
exists, or worse, forgotten that visitation is not forbidden. But last
night, as she lay sleeping, wrapped in a sheet and cuddled up against
her mother, the little girl, now 10, was not child, but butterfly. I
kissed her as softly as I could because I don’t want lips or love to
damage her so very fragile wings.
I asked myself what kinds of pilgrimages she might make, who her
companions of choice would be, the landscapes she would prefer to
explore or be forced to walk across and then decided,
‘butterfly-pathways are for butterflies to pick; you can just watch and
be amazed’. And that, friends, is my butterfly story.
The end.
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