The Whistling Butterfly

We all reach a point in life when the way events unfold around us stops making sense. There comes a time when no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we hope for favourable outcomes, the cards seemed to be stacked so staunchly against us that nothing right seems to happen. The last few months of my life have been a fragmented series of exactly such moments. Fortunately or unfortunately, the pressure has been so immense that it feels like the earth too has reluctantly given away, plunging me to the rock-bottom.

From the depth of my rock bottom on a Thursday morning, I found myself raising my hands and praying to the universe for a sign that times will change. To help the universe out in communicating with me, I wished for it to show me three butterflies before end of the week (till Saturday that is).

Let me admit that there was no originality in this request. I came across this particular wish for seeing butterflies over a blog written by a young girl on another continent, far away from the bustling metropolis of concrete structures and seemingly dead people where I live. Let me also admit that I not only initially judged my own prayer as silly, I was rather proud that I had put the universe to a tough test.

I live in a city which is dotted by construction sites like strawberry seeds prevail over its flesh, and places of natural abundance are as rare as, well, rare. ‘Why would butterflies ever venture into a godforsaken place like my city’, I had wondered, partly in an arrogant self-sabotaging prophecy of my own wish.

Do you know how many butterflies I saw before Saturday evening? More than ten, in my counting.

And I know for sure that I saw at least four different ones as they were white, green, orange, and black and white in colour. I also know for sure that I wasn’t hallucinating, because when I pointed out to other people, they saw them too. The most beautiful one, out of the more than ten butterflies I saw, was the orange one. She flew over the windscreen of my car while I drove through a patch of an unforgiving traffic jam.

She was majestic – the orange one. Her warmly bright tangerine wings were laced by a bold black outline and lined by a network of arterial thin lines, of the same shade as the border.

She interrupted her smooth and gentle descent towards my car by a rather jerky dip in her trajectory towards me before course correcting back along her initial smooth path. That dip in her trajectory had been like the nod of an old yet playful gentleman who crosses you in a street and raises his hat while nodding a silent ‘hello’ to you. That’s how my orange one had greeted me that afternoon. The whole world went around in its busy-ness, as she and I had our moment of salutations in mutual recognition and respect.

Her gesture had gotten my attention planted firmly on her. I then saw what I had never heard before. Her wings in her graceful flapping were caressing her ambient air the same way as do the lips of a whistling person gently. The butterfly was whistling for anyone who chose to listen.

The music of air waves she had set in motion touched my being in soothing ripples of a strange love of sorts. It was familiar and alien at the same time. I let it penetrate me anyway. It comforted me, reassured me and made me smile. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t conversant in human languages, but communicated with me in our shared silence. It was a shared silence of our mutual admiration and timeless love. It was like she halted time and expanded space in that moment.

Image Source: Google Images

‘Am I imagining this? Is this really happening? Is the universe really sending me butterflies to instil faith in me? Have butterflies always been around but I have never looked up to notice one?’, I had wondered to myself. She seemed to have heard the doubts racing through my mind because she addressed them in what she said next.

‘It doesn’t matter’, she had said. ‘It doesn’t matter dear friend who caused us to meet. It doesn’t matter if we could have met earlier but are only meeting now. What matters is that we are here now and are having this conversation. What matters is the message we are receiving – that you and I, beyond all our seeming and un-seeming differences come from the same unity. We belong to the same tribe, the family fathered by a cosmic providence and mothered by a cosmic energy’, she had claimed.

‘The connection we have is beautiful. Tune in to it, I urge you my friend. I yearn to enhance my being by connecting with yours, which are in fact only illusorily separated. We may be far apart in the physical world, but if you tune in keenly, you will always hear my whistles. You will hear them in the touch of the ocean breeze on your cheeks flowing gently over the waters separating us physically. Have faith my friend, because it is in faith that we are connected across aeons and miles’, she had insisted.

I marvelled at what she said and till date I marvel further over the fact that I believed her then as much as I believe her now. The fluency of her language (or should I say our shared language) got lost on me past that transient conversation, but my belief in her message prevails.