He stepped into the hut. Groping around with outstretched arms would have been a recipe for sending glassware flying; he advanced slowly with one hand in front of him, just above waist height, close to his body. He inched forward for what seemed like minutes without touching anything, then his fingers struck Formica-coated particle board. It was the stuff of all their furniture: his own desk, the table they ate from. Unless he’d veered wildly off course, this was the main bench that ran along the length of the hut, not quite bisecting it. He glanced over his shoulder; he appeared to have walked straight in. The grey afterimage of the doorway took forever to fade, and when it did he could still see nothing ahead of him. He turned to the left and walked beside the bench, his right hand brushing the side of the benchtop, the left on guard for obstacles.
After sidestepping a stool and a chair on castors, Prabir came to a patch of starlight falling on the bench from one of the windows. He moved his right hand tentatively into the faint illumination, complicating the already baffling shadows and hints of surfaces. He touched cool metal, slightly rough and curved. A microscope. He could smell the grease on the focusing rack-and-pinion; it was a distinctive odour, summoning memories. His father propping him up on a stool so he could peer into a microscope, back in Calcutta. Showing him the scales on the butterfly’s wings, glinting like tiny emerald prisms. Prabir’s stomach tightened until he could taste acid, but that only strengthened his resolve. The worse he felt about doing this, the more necessary it seemed.
He pictured the daylight view through the window. He’d seen his father hunched over the microscope; he knew where he was now, and where he needed to go. Opening a cage full of adults in the dark would be asking for trouble; he could hardly expect to find their bodies by touch without waking them, and even if none escaped, their wings were easily damaged. The larvae were covered with sharp bristles and spurted a malodorous brown irritant. He could probably have overcome his reluctance to touch them—they were only caterpillars, after all; it wouldn’t be like thrusting his hand into a cage full of scorpions—but he’d seen the kind of stains the irritant left on his father’s skin. He’d be hard pressed to explain an equally bad case as the product of a chance encounter.
A couple of metres further along the bench, he found what he hoped was the right cage. He flicked the taut mesh a few times, and listened for a response. No nervous fluttering, no angry hiss. He put his face to the mesh and inhaled; behind the metallic scent there was sap and leaves. Prabir had seen the pupae hanging by narrow threads from the branches in the cage, lumpy orange-black-and-green objects, each supported by a coarse silk net—what his father called a ‘girdle’—like small, misshapen, fungus-rotted melons in individual string bags. The larvae spun no proper cocoon to hide their metamorphosis; they did it naked, and it was not a pretty sight. But however ugly their jumble of dissolving parts, they wouldn’t be half as unpleasant to handle as they were before the process began.
Prabir opened the cage and reached in.
He pulled his hand back. Idiot. He couldn’t trust a vague memory of how the cage had once looked to guide him. He had to start near the bottom and work his way up, lest he sever one of the supporting threads. And he needed sweat on his fingers now, so the first touch would count.
His arms and sides were dripping from the night’s humidity; he soaked his right hand and placed it, palm up, on the bottom of the cage. Then he raised his arm slowly. The empty space above the floor of the cage seemed to go on forever; he could feel his palm drying while the rest of his skin shed nervous rivulets. He tried to remember what his father had told him about the breeding cycle. Maybe there were no pupae in the cage at all.
When his hand was shoulder-high, his wrist finally touched something.
It was cool and springy. One of the branches.
He withdrew his arm. It was trembling.
One more time, he decided. If he failed again, he’d walk away.
As he stood beside the cage, trying to remember exactly where he’d placed his hand the first time, Prabir became aware of a faint, unfamiliar drone coming from somewhere outside the hut. He was puzzled; he knew the sound of every machine in the kampung, whether they were working smoothly, labouring against an overload, or seizing up completely. If there were any mysteries left, they’d be in here with him: some automated piece of lab equipment or refrigeration pump, too quiet to hear from the outside. But the source of this sound was not in the hut, he was sure of that.
It was a jet. Flying lower than usual. Or maybe not; maybe the night air changed the acoustics. The sound was so faint it would never have woken him. He couldn’t be sure that this was anything new.
He stood in the dark, listening to the aircraft approaching. If it was flying lower, what did that mean?If he ran and woke his parents, no one would demand to know what he’d been doing. He’d been woken by stomach pains, that was all he’d need to say.
The drone grew louder, then suddenly dropped in pitch. Prabir remained paralysed, picturing bombs tumbling through the air, falling towards their target as the plane accelerated away. But as the retreating engines faded, nothing followed. Only frog calls from the jungle.
Prabir almost laughed with relief, but the sound stuck in his throat. Maybe the signs had protected them, the paint visible against the warmth of the roof panels, black-on-green in the false colours of an infrared display. But if the plane’s destination had been elsewhere all along—if Teranesia had meant nothing to the pilot but a fleeting piece of scenery beneath the flight path—then the bombs could still fall tonight. On some other island.
Prabir stared into the darkness, a hollow ache in his chest. He put his hand into the cage again, and continued the search. This time he was rewarded: his fingertips brushed against the side of a chrysalis. The impact set it swinging, but the silk thread holding it was resilient. He waited for the oscillations to die down, then cupped it gently in the palm of his hand. The surface was cool and smooth, like shellac.
He wasn’t sure now how much sweat he’d had on his palm, and he didn’t want to try to move his left hand into the cage as well—that would mean twisting his body, and worrying about new obstacles. He stood perfectly still for a while, fixing the position of the chrysalis in his mind. Then he withdrew his hand, coated it thoroughly, and wiped a second, surer dose of poison across the surface of the sleeping insect.
He closed the cage and walked out of the hut the way he’d come. Belatedly, he crouched to check for footprints, but there was enough grass along the route he’d taken to keep him from making any impression in the soil, and to keep his feet from being dusty enough to have left a visible trail indoors.
As he lay down in his hammock, he felt physically drained, more exhausted than when he’d half climbed the volcano. But everything he’d done in the butterfly hut already felt less real than a dream. Not having seen the crime would make it easier to keep the guilt from his face when he heard the news. By the time the poisoned butterfly failed to emerge—or unfurled its wings and died in the sunlight—no memory would remain of the faint mental image of his hand inside the cage.
Prabir was walking back from the beach, Madhusree in his arms, when he heard a loud, dull thud from the direction of the kampung. It could almost have been a tree toppling, but there’d been no screech of tearing wood, no rustle of branches.
Madhusree gave him a puzzled look, but didn’t press him for an explanation; she was perfectly capable of inventing one herself. They’d all get to hear it at dinner: a new creature on the island, probably, blundering around in search of children to eat.
Prabir heard his mother cry out, her voice rising in horror. ‘Rajendra!’ Madhusree looked startled, then her mouth curled. Prabir put her down on the path. ‘Stay here.’ He began running towards the kampung. Madhusree screamed wordlessly after him; he turned and saw her flapping her arms in distress. He stopped and gazed back at her, torn. What if there was danger here, too? If soldiers had parachuted from the plane, they could be anywhere.