Wingless Butterflies
It was a morning like any other, except that there was a procession for a one-winged butterfly that had died on my front porch. The congregation was held by an army of red ants. They were strategic and fast. The army had already separated the other wing from the dead-body which a legion of them were carrying to their food-storage space, wherever that was.
I touched the butterfly’s lifeless body. It was still warm.
“You guys could have waited till she turned cold!” I shamed the ants. They didn’t spare a moment for my protest. One of them bit me. The butterfly body had been claimed, I had to step aside.
I stared at the butterfly for some time. It was of a large red, black, white kind, a Vanessa Atlanta, which floats around places with temperate climates in Asia, Australia, North and Central America.
“Where is the rest of your family, Vanessa?” I asked. It was mid-July in Washington DC, our weather welcomed in many from her family. I had seen them flying around my garden since May.
“Why did you give up?” I asked her yet another question, quietly. By then Vanessa had no wings attached to her body. She was as lean and wingless as a tiny human, helplessly headed to her final rights.
I contemplated if I should break up her funeral and the ants’ feast with some twigs from my garden. “Maybe some flowers,” I thought, and reached for a few honeysuckles from my favourite bush. The white petals smelled of wild honey and jasmine. I sprinkled them over Vanessa’s remaining butterfly parts.
Surprising me, the red ants stepped back. I would like to think they halted to pray. A new ritual was introduced to their ceremony. They observed a moment of silence. Then they left Vanessa untouched.
“Is that why flowers are placed over dead bodies?” I mumbled, “To delay the decay, protecting it from nature’s quick, efficient math?”
I carried the wingless butterfly under the honeysuckle bush and laid her down on the soil. “What comes from clay must return to it.” I uttered like a priest.
In the shower, I sang an old lullaby.
During breakfast, I turned on the television to listen to that lullaby sung by a more professional voice. My living room vibrated with music of the past in an alto tone,
Don’t bring me a coin,
I don’t care for a dime,
Sing me a song,
Give me wings sublime,
Do we breathe in the sky
The same as the ground,
Can we float for free
Don’t ask me for pounds.
I guess the song was supposed to teach us that money can’t buy it all. Though that’s all we later learned to do – earn money to buy a life in which we could listen to this song again and forget all the years it took to get there in between.
The phone rang, it was my brother, Sherjil. We worked together. He joined my company after my mom, our last surviving parent, died. He moved closer to me, like the way he used to live close to her. I didn’t mind since all we had were each other.
I didn’t pick up the phone. He would be on the bus that I was to take in a few minutes anyway. I ate my yoghurt with chia seeds and wanted the song to finish before I had to leave for the day. There were many meetings lined up. We led a not-for-profit that ran online schools for children in four countries. All four of those countries used to be called developing. Now we call them progressing. The online schools took off after the twenty-third pandemic had hit the earth, and remote education was what the parents preferred permanently. We provided quality learning by teachers from around the world. In certain cases, the children met in classrooms twice a week; in others, they mostly interacted on digital platforms. The venture had turned out to be a win-win for all sides.
The phone rang again. I grumbled. “You are so annoying!” I picked up.
“Turn on the television,” Sherjil screamed.
“It’s already on. Hear that? That old lullaby we used to sing when we were kids.”
“No, stop the music stuff and go to a news channel. Now, please!” He urged.
I obliged. I flipped to a channel which had sixteen different boxes on the screen. There were news anchors from all parts of the world, with varying shades and styles. They spoke one at a time, but their message was the same.
“The scientists have confirmed the news.” An attractive journalist spoke in a shaky tone. “All the air will indeed be gone from the earth by tomorrow morning. And, as we cannot survive in such a vacuum, this day, July 15, 2042, will be the last for all of us on our planet.”
“We confirm,” the other anchors echoed one by one. Each with a different accent but holding similar expressions of disbelief. They were all holding expert reports in hand, humanity’s final verdict from their country’s best minds. I couldn’t help but marvel at how all seven continents agreed on something, probably for the first time.
I flipped through fifty or so channels, and forty-nine of them were broadcasting the news about the last day of our lives. Only one channel aired Roman Holiday, and I paused a second to admire Audrey Hepburn’s perfect jawline.
I got on the bus half an hour later. Sherjil was already on it, saving me a seat next to him like always. The passengers were awestruck, some teary, others speaking to close ones who were far away.
“Why are we on this bus again?” I asked Sherjil as an afterthought.
“I guess we just keep doing what we do?” He said confusedly. “By the way, that guy is staring at you.” He looked straight at the man who had been looking at me for the past year, but never said hi.
“I would probably go out with him if he had asked me out. We could even have had a kid by now.” I contemplated saying hello to him for the first time.
“Don’t. Let it be.” Sherjil knew I was about to break that long-standing ice.
I blamed the online-dating apps boom and then doom for this man’s awkwardness. By the time the dating apps saw their last days, our romantic motor skills had bled out of our thumbs. It left us with nervous sweats and zero approachability when encountering romantic possibilities. We had gone back to the ways of our parents, couples met through family and friends. Our peers and kin softened the tongue-tied first encounters with potential love interests.
“If it is really the last day on this planet, I wouldn’t mind being kissed by a man,” I told Sherjil. Who made a grossed-out face in return.
“If!” he added, “Do you not believe the news?”
“Do you?” I believed the news.
“I do.” He answered.
I don’t know when we locked our hands. Sherjil’s clammy and mine too warm. I looked around and saw that all the hands on the bus were expressive in some way. They were locked or counting, pressed against the window, the right fiddling with the left, touching things on phone screens, everyone was silently listening to the news.
Our noses and mouths were also taking in more air. “It had to be you, huh!” I spoke to a sudden mild breeze which joined us through the bus’s open windows. Someone’s busy hands had slid them open.
“Breathe all you can, people,” An old man in the back hollered. “What’s been free all our lives will soon be priceless. Let’s breathe on!”
At work, almost all our colleagues had turned up minus one or two.
“Don’t you want to be with your families?” I asked our account manager. Who did not respond but looked at my face for a moment too long, as though to memorise it.
“We don’t do well with extended mourning.” Sherjil was talking to his team.
“Let’s not mourn.” A young woman said. I had a hunch that she harboured a crush on Sherjil.
“Did you see the news?” Another asked.
“What now?”
“Look!”
On the screen, a war journalist was reporting from a decade-long warzone, “The war has finally ended two hours ago. Those who survived are gathering to reminisce about what their lives used to be before this conflict. Sworn enemies are sitting together to draw maps of their countries, except they don’t remember anymore what was whose, and why it was so important that one of them won.”
“Pathetic.”
“Beautiful.”
“They could have done this yesterday, or last year, or ten years ago. They should not have had this war at all.”
“True.”
“True.”
“True.”
That night we ate dinner together, Sherjil and I. We cooked, not our favourite dishes but what felt easy. I had the sudden urge to rest.
“Is this how soldiers feel when they return from battles?” I thought out loud. “When the warriors can finally stop being angry, vengeful and excited.” I wanted to lie down.
“Don’t sleep.” Sherjil was not going home. We had planned on staying at my place. There was a call we had to take with a school in Nigeria. It was to be at 2 am Eastern Standard Time, which was daytime in West Africa. The principal of the school urged us to not cancel the meeting. We had a regular monthly call with this group of children. They were in the North-West side of the country. During our calls, I often got lost in the background landscape, revealing the arid beauty of Nigeria. The children usually sang in the foreground, large-eyed and gorgeous. Humans are born learners, even in these last hours when we were learning to accept our fate, together.
“Well, at least the mystery is solved. We spend all our lives wondering how we will go. Well, here it is! This finality provides some strange solace, doesn’t it?” I philosophised.
Sherjil rolled his eyes, which looked mildly teary.
We had planned to take the call from home but right around 1 am, Sherjil woke me with a nudge. I had fallen asleep on the sofa after checking on Vanessa, the wingless butterfly. She was still there, below the honeysuckle bush, surrounded by the ceremonial flowers. Vanessa was already turning into a part of the plant.
“Do you really want to sleep on the last day of your life?” Sherjil pulled me up.
“Stop!” I kicked him like I used to when we were kids.
“Let’s go to work. Let’s take the call from there.” Sherjil had been pacing all night. He needed to get out.
Like a good sister, which I didn’t always give myself credit for being, I nodded my head. He needed to move.
I thought about my father. He was a workaholic like the two of us. He died young.
Next to the garage, a gardenia had just bloomed under the summer night’s crescent moon. We took my scooter, Sherjil drove. It was almost 1.30 am but the streets looked to be 8 pm. People strolled and wandered; some had brought their dogs along for a long walk. A few sat on the pavement watching the stars. Everyone was consciously breathing and breathing more.
At work, we were again surprised. Several of our colleagues were still there, those who chose not to go home. They were the single ones like us. We were the majority in our city anyway.
“You should kiss that girl, you know.” I joked. My eyes pointed to the young woman who looked at Sherjil with a meaningful glance. “We still have a few hours left,” I think that’s what her mute stare suggested.
“You think so?” Sherjil hesitated.
“At least go talk to her. Spend some time.” I pushed him towards her desk.
I entered the conference room, where a glass wall exposed our city’s skyline. In the night’s light, everything appeared peaceful. I calculated that when the air goes nil, will it take a bit more time to feel it since we were indoors? How much time were we buying? Minutes perhaps.
Now I am on a call which started on time. The bright Nigerian countryside shines in the background. The children are as stunning as I remember. “Why did your parents let you come to school?” I feel like asking but don’t.
“We still have air here!” One of them shouts.
For the first time in the last 18 hours, I feel like crying. But I am holding back my tears. I can’t let the kids down.
The children are showing me an elaborate 5D program they created. My eyes pop with awe. I clap.
“Is it already dawn there?” One of them yells.
I turn back. Our wall-to-wall glass window shows the DC sky turning pale. It appears as though the sun is about to come out. I tell the kids to hold on a minute. I walk to the window and see a breathtaking twilight. I remember the White Nights in St Petersburg. Our parents had taken us to Russia one July, many Julys ago. The sun had never set during White Nights, and for an hour, the sky was a spectacular, blue, grey, orange, red, yellow, just like now.
There are more people on the streets, some holding their children, some their pets. Another procession to end the day. I think of the red ant army that must have had a feast with those butterfly wings. One of their last.
The people on the street are carrying candles. I can’t hear but I know they are singing something, perhaps a lullaby.
I notice the candle flames disappear one after another and then together. I hear a few of the Nigerian children from the screen behind calling each other. I turn and find the session has cut off.
My right hand crawls up the glass wall. I watch the people kneel to the ground, and then I grasp for the last iota of air. We close our eyes.
Iffat Nawaz is a novelist. Her debut work of fiction, Shurjo’s Clan, was published by Penguin Random House India in 2022.
