--Sunil Sharma
My grandma had a strange secret. She could turn easily into a butterfly! I never knew it—till the age eight. The discovery left me thrilled. My little thin granny, a secret butterfly! Wow!
That moment is still vivid. It was a warm night. Hot wind was blowing across the small town buried in the dry drab desert, hissing loudly. The lights were out everywhere. The strong wind was rattling the tiles of the far-off cottages, like an angry giant, where railway employees lived with their families, near the gleaming tracks. We were lying on the roof of the two-storied stone house. A huge moon had come out early; the sky was awash in milky white colour. The big-eared and tall rabbit stood on its legs, its ears raised, peeping down, looking directly at me from that high- perch moon floating like a white ball in the vast solitude of the heavens. In the distance, a lonely lamp burnt in a shrine on top of a dark barren hill. The wind suddenly shrieked in my kiddy ears.
“Wind is fuming tonight.” Pronounced grandma.
“Why?” I got frightened. I always do—getting scared easily.
“Hissing wind is no good. It means somebody somewhere will die.” As if on cue, a dog wailed terrifyingly, followed by wailing others. I shrank inside. “I want to go and meet my Momma.”
“Sorry. You cannot go.”
“Why?”
“She is ill. In the hospital. Will return in a week or so,” said granny in a gravelly voice.
I grew silent. Tears poured down like big raindrops falling on the lotus petals. My body shook. Grandma ran her steely claws in my tousled hair. I cried silently, frail body shaking. Desperately wanting to flee the set up.
My mamma came floating in the white clouds, arms outstretched pale face smiling. The harsh desert wind blew into my tear-stained eyes.
“I know, child, what you thinking.”
I looked at her, bewildered. “You want to fly away?”
I was shaken. How does granny know?
“Quite often, I feel the same way… I also want to fly away… to a distant place…a far-off place.” I dried up my eyes with my tiny hands and looked up at her.
“And I often do.”
My jaw dropped. “Grandma can fly?”
She said, “Yes. When I want to fly, I turn myself into a butterfly.”
“What?”
“Yes, child. I can easily transform into a butterfly and soar into the skies. Up, up & above, flying gently in the nightly sky, on my two light wings, drinking in the pure air of the heavens, nothing to worry about…”
I forgot mamma and listened hungrily.
“How can you become a butterfly?”
“Oh! That anybody can do. Even you can do, once you grow up as a woman, get married and have babies. Not before that.”
I was speechless, imagining my fragile body turning into a butterfly.
“Grandma, when do you fly away?”
“Whenever I feel like. Mornings. Afternoons. Preferably, on the long and lonely nights.”
“But science teacher once said butterflies do not fly in the night.”
“Oh, nonsense. I can fly any time I like. I can fly off in nights also.” I was just thunderstruck. It was awesome. My grandma, a butterfly and a night butterfly at that.
“Does grandpa know this?”
“No. And do not tell that old nasty man ever. He does nothing but shouts at me all the day. Always yelling, cursing. When he gets nasty, I become irritated. So I withdraw into the attic and then vanish into the open air as a butterfly. The old man searches everywhere but does not find me. Ha, Ha Ha!”
“What, if he finds out?”
“Oh, I will never be human again. I will remain a butterfly only, trapped in that fragile form forever.”
“How?”
“Because he will kill my paper butterfly figure kept in a book of mine. I will not be able to get back to my human form.”
“Does anybody know this?”
“Nope. Only you.”
“O.k. I won’t tell anybody.”
“Good girl.”
We kept quiet. The stars shone bright.
“Grandma?”
“Yes.”
“Can I become one, a butterfly?”
“I told you, child. You are already a butterfly. All girls are.”
“No but I want to be a real one.”
“You will, once you get married. The time will find you at the right moment and then, you will become one, like me. It runs in our family.”
That warm May night is etched forever. That night, on the hot roof of a two-storied, non-descript stone house, buried in a small desert-town, I imagined I was flying like a butterfly. Up, up and above, soaring, looking at the tall rabbit in the moon.
Today, I am holding the paper butterfly that my small, thin daadi had made some twenty years ago and kept it hidden in a book of poetry. Today, I was going through her things forgotten in that attic and found the lifeless paper butterfly that suddenly grew live in my hands and flew away.
“You will become a butterfly at the right time,” she had said that night, pausing long—it was a message she had again delivered on her second death anniversary, today, suddenly to me—Once you get married, have kids. She had concluded on that magical night many many years ago.
I understood her in an instant—My paternal grandma was speaking through the yawning gap that divides the dead from the living.
I came down running to the stale small room where my ailing father was lying on the bed.
“I am not going back to my married home.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not want to get hit in the stomach or the back, repeatedly. I do not want to be treated as an unpaid slave to my husband and his abusive clan. I am a post-graduate with a degree in computers. I am not a machine.”
Father said nothing, stunned as he was for a minute. Just then, hundreds of monarch butterflies entered the room, circulated and circled above my head and before I could say anything, I became a butterfly and I flew out with my pretty winged sisters into dazzling sunshine. Into pure freedom. Granny was right. It runs in the family after all. She had passed on the rare family secret to me at the right moment.
