Musty evenings and dead butterflies

 

Musty evenings, a decoction of sweat and sultry mawkishness. This is the season of mating. A peacock hooting, scattering the suggestive fragrance of its desire to be caught by some coquettish brunette of its species. Creation is fortuitously bound to chance winds at this level. Sometimes it fruitlessly sails through the sky; sometimes it hits home and the dance of desire starts, the fantail spread to handover its thoroughbred royal blue hues to the next generation.

The yard bricks have moss, the air musty, the day grey and old. It gives a very ancient feeling. A little bit before the twilight hits, I light my lamp of devotion under a holy pair—tulsi and shami plants. My little altar is under the peregrina tree. The latter has ample leafy garments thanks to the rainy season. It’s aflame with crimson clusters of flowers—a representative of the smoldering sensuality riding the humid layer. Little grass-green butterflies flutter among the flowers through the day. The flowers are aplenty and hundreds of them drizzle over the place of my clay lamp after fulfilling their blooming duty. And so do a few butterflies that fall with the flowers never to rise again.

It’s a sad sight to see dead butterflies among the fallen flowers around the evening twilight. You smell the musty odor of death. But flowers and butterflies—even when dead—have enough colors in them to still hold the beacon of life. They somehow thwart the overflowing silence of death. And there I light my lamp of faith among old dead flowers and forever sleeping butterflies. A flicker of hope and faith, fallen flowers and butterfly corpses, musty moments hung with sultry detachment, the day slowly dying to finish its journey at the twilight, a humid night taking birth, a lone butterfly still dancing among the flowers owning the entire tree to herself, the birds retiring to roost for the night, and a poetic man witnessing this slowly shifting picture on the canvas of mother existence.