“So. . so what did you do?” Anjali sounded worried.
“I nearly ran into an oncoming bus! If there’d been an accident, it would have been the bee’s fault,” Rahul said.
“My goodness!” Anjali said, reeling from the thought. “Then how did the bee get out of the helmet?”
“Get out? I pulled to the side, took the helmet off, and it just flew away.”
“Oh!” Anjali let out a big sigh of relief. “Just thinking about it — how awful and scary it must have been to have a bee trapped inside your helmet buzzing around on your head.”
“That’s exactly how it was. And going fifty miles an hour on top of everything.” Rahul smiled proudly.
But Anjali was no longer concerned. “You still haven’t proven your point,” she said.
“Huh?”
“The thing from before. .”
“What thing?” Rahul didn’t understand.
“The thing about butterflies not stinging,” Anjali said.
Rahul started to laugh. “Butterflies don’t sting. I’ll bet you. Bees do, like I said.”
“Just because bees sting doesn’t mean that butterflies don’t,” Anjali argued.
“You’re weird.”
“Why?”
“Butterflies don’t sting because they land on flowers. Bees, on the other hand, land on sweets and water near tanks,” Rahul said. “Haven’t you seen all the bees swarming in a sweets shop around the jalebis, the gujhi, the barfi?”
“Bees hover around flowers, and they sting. And flies swarm around sweets. They don’t sting,” Anjali countered.
Rahul was beginning to despair. How could he convince this girl that butterflies didn’t sting? He’d been successful in convincing her that bees do. But that was only half a victory. Winning the other half was proving no easy task.
“Butterflies don’t have stingers, so they don’t sting. Bees have them. In the back, near the tail.” Rahul argued his case with careful consideration as if playing his trump card.
Anjali raised another question: “Have you seen with your own eyes that there’s no stinger on the back of the butterfly?”
Now Rahul gave up hope. He ran out of steam and fell flat on his back. His body went limp and he rolled around in the grass. “I give up! I now fully agree, Princess Diana-ji, that the butterfly that landed on your shoulder, flew off, and just landed on your parasol, stings. Okay? Happy? Can we please change the topic?”
Anjali began laughing again, maybe at her victory, maybe at Rahul’s surrender.
“Now what’s so funny?” Rahul’s mood began to lighten as his annoyance abated.
Anjali grabbed a clump of grass with her right hand and tossed it at Rahul. “What is it with you? How do you manage to tell the truth, and still lose?” She laughed.
No one had said this to Rahul before. He felt as if Anjali, so easily, so casually, had managed to grasp this about him. This was the first time he and Anjali had quarreled, playfully, and even though he’d been right, he lost.
But why was this defeat feeling so good? Why was he so happy?
I drank
I drank
Now what? Now what?
My heart
Is hers
Now what? Now what?
Rahul began to hum the tune, slowly. There was shade under the neem tree. Thick and cool. A September breeze, filled with its afternoon freshness, moisture, and heat. The monsoon hadn’t completely receded. Heavy clouds could gather in the sky at any moment and burst into rain.
The parasol was still in the same spot, occasionally trembling in the breeze. The butterfly on top had folded its wings and had, perhaps, fallen asleep.
Do butterflies dream? Rahul had read somewhere that we humans can perceive only seven of the colors in the spectrum, whereas butterflies can see thousands. Such a teeny-tiny flying insect with such beautiful wings. How small its eyes must be! And a retina smaller yet, the size of a pinprick. What kinds of tiny images would be created by a retina so small?
But images are nothing more than representations of light, read by the brain. So is the butterfly’s brain, which senses thousands of symbols of color, more sophisticated than ours? And if that’s the case, then the butterfly must also be capable of incredibly developed and sophisticated thought. This means the butterfly that flew, frightened, from Anjali’s shoulder to the yellow parasol is now asleep, dreaming a Technicolor dream, magical, intricate, of a cosmos unknown.
If butterflies were capable of language, we could know about their dreams, colors, and world. Maybe they do have language and, just as we’re not able to perceive the thousands of colors they can, we probably can’t discern the various sounds, tones, and consonants of their sophisticaed, intricate, unknown tongue.
Butterflies would have their own alphabet if they could write. Who knows? The butterfly might be sitting on a flower or leaf and writing away. And wouldn’t we be able to read it?
My goodness! More sophisticated than even the most complex computer filled with the best microchips is the brain of the butterfly. Who installed this biogenetic microchip inside the brain of this tiny insect? Who painted all the patterns on its wings?
“Is it really true?” Anjali asked. Her voice roused Rahul from his daze.
“Is what true?” he asked.
“The thing Anima mentioned the other day in the canteen.”
“When?” Rahul played dumb.
“C’mon, don’t you remember? Just after you got admission into the Hindi department and you were treating us to chai and samosas,” Anjali said, in a serious attempt to stir his memory. However, there was absolutely no need to remind him.
“What are you talking about?” Rahul asked. “Don’t beat around the bush.”
Anjali thought about it for a moment and then haltingly began, “You know, the thing about dropping out of anthropology and transferring to the Hindi department because. .”
Rahul studied Anjali. This was his chance to get revenge for the earlier defeat. “Because what?” he said innocently.
“Because. .” Anjali said, glaring.
“Becaaauuuse?” Rahul asked again, drawing it out as far as he could.
“You’re impossible!” She was annoyed. “Never mind. I don’t care anyhow.”
Anjali’s remark stirred up something inside Rahul, and it was fear. Rahul felt that Anjali, even as she was asking him, was in no mood for jokes. She actually had been eager to find out why. But now the giggling was over and a kind of suffering and torment had begun. The lines of tension intersecting on her forehead were quite visible.
How beautiful those lines were, but why did they need to be there at all? Why did stress show up on the forehead of a girl who, ordinarily, was laughing? This too was because of him.
Rahul noticed that Anjali’s eyes were fixed on him with an expression of eagerness or plea. There was something in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Rahul felt his throat was dry, as if the sweet fever were again creeping up. He swallowed hard. His mouth was getting dry. He looked at Anjali and slowly said, “Yes.”
“Yes what?” Anjali asked, her voice trembling.
“It’s true,” Rahul said. He lowered his head and ran his fingers over a blade of grass. Where had this sprouted from?
A cool breeze suddenly arrived. Even though it was September, the breeze retained some of August’s leftover humidity. The blades of grass gently blew in the wind. A silence had descended.
Rahul lifted his head up; her eyes were as before, fixed on him. Rahul couldn’t meet her gaze. He looked in the other direction, at the butterfly asleep atop the parasol rocking gently in the wind. The butterfly must certainly be dreaming now.
Right that instant, the magic began. Holding his breath and not blinking, Rahul’s gaze fixed on the full expanse of that magic. There are twenty-four frames in each second of film. In slow motion he watched every instant and detail of whatever took place in that scene. It was surprising, amazing — Rahul could hardly breathe.