Butterflies at Bhimtaal

Butterflies at Bhimtaal

This land may be bought, sold, registered, transferred, or pawned. And you can bring up your children on it - climbing mango trees, walking narrow hedges, swaying to the crest of August rainfall on their faces. You can swell with pride amongst friends having tea amidst a bouquet of wild lilies that have spluttered magically at the edge of your well-manicured garden, or sit by moonless night, alone, contemplating the change of seasons.

It’s butterflies that will inherit this earth though...

They lived amongst grass shrubs, fed on marigolds, hovered anxiously upon autumn leaves, watched with awe bar-tailed godwits, long before we made a road through this land. It was their earth they lend us. At night, they hover silently over lemon trees and old oaks, their wings glowing with energy from moon’s light flickers, their shadows slowly circumscribing arcs on fallen acorns. The meek that shall inherit this earth, as Lord spoke, no longer exist; it’s the powerful and rich, masquerading as weak, that eye this land in hunger, their eyes building apartments in the reflections of Garud taal, where Barking Deer used to come in hot summer afternoons, to quench their thirst for a swallow of water.

It’s butterflies that will inherit this earth though...

They play, fertilize and pollinate, and in rare moments of equality or compassion, sit on rough-hewn stones watching the lake (through molten flow of rocks flowing to water, their reflection slowly traces long concentric circles deep into water). Their play is play by swinging flower stalks, their companionship is swirling with the many over bushes, tall grasses, and blue skies. They hover over petunias, marigolds, and golden red rhodendrons, their white wings (tinged on the edges with blue teal) gliding like parachute in swaying winds. Mindless and intoxicated by ripples of shining lake water, they sway around like “drunkard on a parapet,” in the words of Mystic Rumi. They leave no tracks on the sky, keep no records, and are driven and consumed by the shuttering sound of the last grocer shop high up in the mountains (when Basu bhai shutters down in the eve, saying goodbye to sacks of flour, bottled coconut candies, and the birds nested above the shop’s switchboard). They like it, it seems; why hover there so late otherwise? They were born here and when they wither away, you cannot distinguish a fallen leaf from a fallen wing.

They inherit this land. They earned it, they know this place (and none else), they hide their ownership, they fly to the moon and talk to the ripples of water that wind gifts them; they know the azaan prayers from the mosque, the chase of the monkeys, the night brawls of the evening ducks on the lake.

They own this place because their graves will keep fertilizing this soil long after we are gone; see that banyan, see that shine on pine cones, see the grass lump on brown nozzles of new calfs – it’s their gift to the land. The land they own…