There is an interesting story about how butterflies were born.
Brahma the Creator had a celestial garden. Since he himself was the Creator, he could handpick the plants in his garden. So obviously he had the choicest flowering plants flowering there all at once, right in front of his unbelieving eyes. Brahma had grown to like his private garden, and he used to spend long hours here after a long, hard day's work.
One day everything was hunky dory till he went off to sleep. A few millennia would have passed by that night, as Brahma's one wink equals a thousand years. He got up in the morning and did his ablutions as all humans do; and went for a stroll in the garden. To his dismay, he found that his celestial garden was completely defoliated and destroyed. Only skeletons of stems stood there in mute testimony.
His eyes scanned the entire length and breadth of the garden, and his probing eyes finally settled on a caterpillar that was trying to hide its guilty face behind a bare stem.
Brahma sensed instantly that the caterpillar, with its voracious appetite, had devoured his entire garden. Shivering with anger he cursed the caterpillar that it will never be able to eat again, not even a teenie-weenie shoot. The caterpillar trembled like a leaf at the enormity of the curse. Won't be able to eat ever again; what a terrible predicament! The caterpillar went down on its hundred legs, and begged for mercy. Brahma took pity but he said, like words, curses can't be taken back. So he modified the curse and said that since the caterpillar cannot eat anymore it will become a pupa, and live without eating. But when it emerges from the pupa, it will transform itself from an ugly caterpillar to the most beautiful creature on earth: the butterfly!
What an imaginative story about the amazing metamorphosis of the butterfly: egg to caterpillar to pupa to butterfly.
In other cultures too, the butterfly holds a lot of mystical meanings. In Greek culture, the word for butterfly is 'psyche', which means 'soul'. And it's believed that butterflies are souls appearing in front of human beings in their most stunning incarnation. Mexicans too believe that butterflies are souls returning to visit the living; as a butterfly called Monarch migrates to Mexico and manages to reach there just in time for the Day of the Dead.
The Indians have a different, humorous story to tell. Here souls take the form of crows when they come a-visiting their near and dear ones, once a year. There's story about why the lowly crows were chosen over all the exotic birds in the avian kingdom. Once upon a time, during Shraaddha, or the Ritual of Feeding the Dead, the real father used to visit his children and partake of the offerings made to him. But many a time when one performed the ritual, someone else other than the proclaimed father descended on the scene – much to the chagrin of the children. To put an end to this untold misery, everyone prayed to Indra, the God of Gods, to send the dear departed souls in the form of unidentifiable crows. Obviously, to avoid potential DNA tests. Indra relented, and Indians were saved from extreme social embarrassment.
Coming back to butterflies, what's the origin of such an ugly name for the most symmetrically beautiful of all living beings. Butter that flies? Yes, precisely that was how the name butterfly was coined. An Englishman, looking lazily out of his English home on a balmy afternoon, saw some yellow things fluttering by his window. As he was yet to have his lunch, all that he could think of was food. He exclaimed, 'Look at those butter-like things flying past!' And his friends, equally unimaginative, said, 'Yes, yes! Butter flies!'
The words for butterfly in various other languages are so beautiful to utter. Titli in Hindi, Chitrashalabham in Malayalam, Hutieh in Chinese, Psyche in Greek, Dushichka in Russian. But in German, all beautiful words acquire a guttural sound, and in this case ends up as a real mouthful: 'Schmetterling'!
The moment you utter the word 'insect', a hairy, dark Creature of the Night fills our senses. Actually this image is that of the quintessential moth. If someone told us that the butterfly is also an 'insect', we would shake our head in sheer disbelief and say, 'It can't be; it's so beautiful!' But the biological truth is that over a period of a 100 million years the moth evolved itself into the exquisite butterfly. If I were to designate an animal to be at the pinnacle of evolution, I would displace man/woman from his/her pedestal, and replace him/her with the butterfly.
There are 20,000 species of this epitome of beauty in the world. 1,500 of them flutter about in India, and 150 of them in Amchi Mumbai alone. They come in all shapes, designs and colours. The variations are as if God looked through a celestial kaleidoscope of a million colours and designs, and created one with every turn.
The interest in the observation of butterflies seems to be very nascent. The reason for my belief is that unlike the common names of plants and birds that are diverse and unique, the common names of butterflies are very ad hoc, thought-of-in-a-hurry kind of names. And often borrowed from every day life. Sample this: There are butterflies with names like sailor, commander and sergeant; peacock and common crow; leopard and tiger; baron, nawab and raja! The only reassuring aspect of this nomenclature is that, unlike in the case of birds, it doesn't reek of casteism. Among birds, the beautiful kite is named 'Brahminy kite', but the ugly one is called 'Pariah kite'. And there are Brahminy mynahs and Brahminy ducks to rub salt in the casteist wound.
My personal interest in these wonderful creatures was kindled by a book written by the well-known naturalist, Isaac Kehimkar. Armed with this book, I explored Sanjay Gandhi National Park, where I learnt the rudimentary steps of what Isaac calls 'butterflying'. And a few days after my first sojourn, I discovered that they exist in my own backyard, in my garden, and among the potted plants on my terrace.
Later I also learnt how one species of butterfly actually helped the entire butterfly fraternity. There's a species called plain tiger butterflies. As a caterpillar, it eats the leaves of a plant called calotropis that's extremely poisonous. But the caterpillar consumes this poison in such minute quantities that it doesn't get killed in the bargain. On the contrary, it carries this poison into its next stage of pupa, and into its life as a butterfly. And when a bird, attracted by its vibrant colours, once preyed on the plain tiger butterfly, it realized that it had an obnoxious taste. This information spread like wildfire through the genes, through many generations, and across avian species. Today, whenever a bird sees any butterfly with vibrant colours, it stays far away from it to avoid this bitter truth.
Apart from this visual treat of colours, there are other ways by which the fragile butterflies ward off their predators. As caterpillars they take on the colours and shapes of deadly snakes, and sometimes even strike serpent-like poses with their tiny bodies. Some butterflies have designs on their wings that look like evil eyes staring at their predators without batting an eyelid.
So much for the defenses that nature has given these hapless wonders. In spite of this, butterflies are chased by predators, and often the two halves of perfection lose their balance, as tips of their wings get bitten off even as they make their great escape. Only to be attacked again, and again, and again. Which probably explains the unpredictable path of their flight. Whereas all birds fly in a straight line, a butterfly flies in a very flitting and haphazard manner – almost as if it’s trying to disguise its flight path.
Butterflies, unlike birds, are late risers. They begin their day an hour after sunrise, in the most lethargic manner. As their engines get their quota of solar power, they gather momentum. And even their colours get their stunning hues only when they get lit up by the rays of the sun. The best time to stalk them, and photograph them, is in the morning. If you hold your breath, you may be lucky enough to get some breathtaking pictures. Even if you don't, you would have clicked those pictures mentally and stored them in the hard disk of your subconscious, only to be deleted at the time of your last breath.
The visions of the southern birdwing, the largest butterfly in India, as it flitted across the evergreen canopy of Silent Valley; the tree nymphs as they glided in the dark interiors of the Parambikkulam forest, and the atlas moth, the largest moth in India, as it rested on a hot afternoon in the cool foliage of Sanjay Gandhi National Park – these are not images that I have captured for posterity on my Nikon. But they are personal visages etched in my memory that I will not trade for any treasure in the world.
The peak butterfly seasons are mainly two: the post-monsoon months from September to November, and the summer months of March and April. They do exist all year long, but the sightings are few and far between. And the most mysterious aspect of the butterfly is that you seldom get to see dead butterflies. Which is what probably made the great poet Pablo Neruda ask, 'Where do butterflies go to die?' And still searching for the answer, I move on.
The average lifespan of a butterfly is a fleeting three months. And maybe because of that very reason, it takes its first confident flight soon after it emerges from the pupa. The moth which is the evolutionary cousin of the butterfly, has a similarly short lifespan. In fact, there are some moths called silk moths that are born, hold your breath, without a mouth and a stomach! The apparent reason is that their lifespan is only a fortnight, and God didn't want them to waste any time eating and drinking. Their only raison d'etre is to mate and reproduce, which they diligently do for a fortnight till they drop down and die.
There is an activity the butterflies often indulge in: It's called mud-puddling. That's when you see the social side of butterflies. They descend in groups on to a wet patch of soil, and they take in the moisture and the minerals, in an animated harmony of colours. Another exquisite activity is their mating dance executed mid air, when they keep circling endlessly around each other, as if playing ring-a-ring-a-roses. Two other interesting facts about them are that they smell with their antennae and taste with their feet.
And definitely there seems to be a divine connection between the most fascinating of all flora that is flowers, and the most wonderful of all fauna that is butterflies. An irresistible attraction that seems to have been made in heaven.
Now to the sad part of the butterfly story. The human attraction to butterflies makes them the most poached of all fauna. As many as 50,00,00,000, yes 50 crore, butterflies are collected from all over Asia, and exported from Taiwan to various parts of the world, every year. And in our own backyard, in Sikkim, 25 kilograms of butterflies were caught recently as the consignment was being shipped out by a Russian, who collected them under the pretext of conducting research.
Yes, plans are afoot to save the tiger that's on the top of the jungle food chain. But sadly none whatsoever to save the tiger butterfly, which according to me, sits firmly on the top of a parallel evolutionary chain.
Let's ensure that these fluttering rainbows don't land up as wall hangings of our vanity, ornaments of our aggression, and table mats of our greed. Let them flutter by, in celebration of our own fleeting life. In our gardens, in our meadows, and deep inside the mystery of our jungles. With their gossamer wings lit up by their very own share of the sun.
