Flying colors

 

It’s a gift to have a blue tiger butterfly among your peregrina blossoms. The status of the bearer of these crimson clusters of little flowers lies between a plant and a tree—a shrub. But give physical care and emotional support and it turns out to be your tree. A small tree but always smiling with its bright flowers. It’s perennially in bloom.

Throughout the monsoons and even later lemon-green butterflies have been feasting among the blooms. But today we have a visitor—a blue tiger butterfly. It has lovely black patterned with bluish spots on the wings. Butterflies can directly absorb sunlight on their wings to get autonomous flight. And we still boast of the solar panels in our satellites! The dark areas on its wings enable greater absorption of heat and fly with ease.

The blue tiger butterfly is bigger than the lemon-green butterflies who I think consider the peregrina tree as their residential tree. It bullies them across the clusters of flowers. It wants to have the entire little tree to itself. It just jumps into the flower where a lime-green butterfly is having tea-time snack. In this airy scuffle many ripe flowers drizzle—little drops born of a fight among the butterflies. Surprisingly it’s successful in driving them away. There it has the entire set of flowers all to herself and enjoys its time, flying from cluster to cluster. A bullying butterfly. But looks beautiful.