Translated short fiction by Sara Rai: A writer chases an elusive, brown butterfly

I was walking beneath the trees. It was morning.

I saw some leaves on the ground. They were twirling down from the tall kadamba trees, even though it was not the season for leaves to fall. Some of the leaves were green, some yellow, and some brown. The foliage was dense but not very dense, and a little sunlight filtered through. The dappled light spread on the ground, creating the impression of fallen leaves.

I started walking on the leaves and suddenly all the brown leaves turned into butterflies. The leaf of a kadamba tree is slightly large, many times larger than a butterfly, I should have thought about this. But I still felt that the leaves had become butterflies. It was as if there was a flood of butterflies, the air was filled with their fluttering. Only then did it dawn upon me that there were hundreds of them sitting on the ground. I drew in a sharp breath in amazement. Were the butterflies laying eggs? But butterflies lay their eggs on leaves, not on the ground. Then these eggs turn into caterpillars and so begins the process of their turning into butterflies. Just last week, I’d noticed some bugs on the underside of the leaves of my gul-e-bakawli. Some were green with black stripes, with hundreds of feet. Were they caterpillars then?

These butterflies were all brown, almost black. They fluttered up in a cloud as soon as they sensed my footsteps, and settled on another spot amidst the clutter of leaves. I saw the butterflies and it seemed to me that the leaves had just flown up and floated down. But they were not leaves. They were butterflies. They started flying again.

I chose one of them that was right next to me. It was a little larger than the others. Its flight was a zigzag one. Stumbling and hesitating, it drew lines upon the air. It went up, then down, and then became almost still, but it never could be still. Its wings were opening and closing. Its flight was never straight.

None of the butterflies flew straight. A desire arose in me. I tried to catch it. I ran after it for some distance. As though it were a deer, or an idea – a thought that always ran ahead of me, always a little beyond my grasp. To catch it, I cast a net of words. Would the idea get caught in the net? Its flight was also zigzag, now stumbling, now running ahead, hesitating and halting. But never straight.

There was a time long ago in my childhood when I was able to catch butterflies. Yellow dust from the butterfly’s wings would settle on my fingers and the wings then became useless for flying. Usually, they were the small yellow butterflies. They were small and the hardest to catch. But then, I too was nimble. I didn’t rest till I’d caught it.

“Let’s press it in the book,” Rini said. That book was a graveyard of butterflies. Almost every page had a butterfly pressed inside it. The butterflies were of different colours. They must have had names too, but we didn’t know those names.

We shut the book with a sharp slapping sound. And the door of death was closed.

Rini looked at me. Her black eyes fluttered like a butterfly’s wings. She put the book away on the highest shelf.

I don’t know where Rini is now. It’s been years since we met. Our lives went in different directions, zigzagging, halting, staggering, drawing separate lines. I don’t even know if she’s alive.

Out of all those colourful butterflies, it’s that small yellow one that flutters into my mind. On its head were two feelers with which it sensed the flowers. They looked like two commas. Its wings were full of yellow light.

But the butterflies I saw now were brown – there was not a single yellow one among them.

The brown butterflies eluded me.

I sat down on a bench near the trees. I sat there motionless, not stirring at all. Then a brown butterfly flew up and sat on my bright red sweater. It sat there with wings folded, quite still. It looked just like a dry leaf. It opened its wings for a moment and closed them again. Like an eye opening and closing. It was so close that I could see the subtle colours on its wings and the pattern that they made. Inside the brown wings, like an inscription on old parchment, were dark yellow and black lines, very fine and wavy, like the last, swiftly fading signs of a lost civilisation.

It closed its wings and became completely still. It began to look like a dry leaf again. I knew that this was a butterfly and not a leaf, but I still got confused. To do away with my perplexity, I touched it lightly. It flew away and became a dry leaf once again, among all the other leaves.

I picked up my paper and pen and cast into the distance my net of words.

Excerpted with permission from ‘Catching Butterflies’ in Other Skies, Other Stories, Sara Rai, translated from the Hindi by Ira Pande and the author, Zubaan Books.