by Ellen Oh
The Butterfly Lovers
A Chinese Folktale
One of China’s four great folktales, “Liang Zhu”—“The Butterfly Lovers,” in English—is the tragic tale of two young lovers kept apart by familial duty. Often considered the Chinese Romeo and Juliet since both stories feature star-crossed lovers, “The Butterfly Lovers” takes place during the Eastern Jin Dynasty (265–420 CE) and grows into legend mostly through the ancient art of oral storytelling. At nearly two thousand years old, it has inspired other forms of art such as operas, plays, movies, and music.
The only daughter of a wealthy family, Zhu Yingtai disguises herself as a boy in order to be allowed to attend school. There she meets Liang Shanbo, and the two classmates quickly become best friends. As the years pass, Zhu falls in love with Liang, and only after she leaves school to attend her ailing father does Liang discover the secret of his friend’s disguise. Realizing he loves her in return, he goes to seek her hand in marriage and is devastated to find out her family has already promised her to another. Liang soon dies of a broken heart, and Zhu mourns her lost love. On the morning of her wedding, there is a terrible storm, and as she weeps at Liang’s grave, thunder shakes open the ground where her dead lover rests. Determined to once again be with Liang, Zhu jumps inside his grave. When the storm subsides, the earth opens to reveal the lovers transformed into butterflies, flying away to be together forever.
Just how deep can loyalty run when it comes to family or one’s land? What if an army and war make the rules instead of wealth and class? When does love go from forbidden to dangerous?
“Bullet, Butterfly” is my retelling of “The Butterfly Lovers.”
—Elsie Chapman
Daughter of the Sun
Shveta Thakrar
For the enchanted Sisterhood of the Moon,
glowing ever bright, growing ever bold
Savitri Mehta’s parents had named her for light. For sunshine and ingots and all things gold. Above all, for the sun god Savitr, or Surya, whose blessing marked Savitri at the moment of her birth: behind her rib cage, she carried not a beating heart but a ball of Surya’s own blazing yellow light.
The Mehtas served as caretakers for a museum on a former rana’s secluded estate, palatial in its wealth of flourishing trees, rain-summoning peacocks, and even a lake surrounded by a pine needle–sprinkled sandy shore, and it was there they retired with their unusual child. Though they and their small staff strove to keep her from sight, the occasional visitor caught Savitri slipping around corners, clothed all in black. Child-sized onyx chaniya choli, frilly frocks, and little bows. Later, when she grew, charcoal minidresses with locks of purple streaking her inky hair. Black with dragon’s-blood-red lipstick against her rich brown skin. Black with silver studs lining her earlobes and a bindi to match.
Black, always black—surely, whispered those adult patrons year after year, she was troubled, despairing, in need. Why else would any girl be so consistently drawn to shadows? The visitors her age were more candid, more cruel: Oh, look, a baby goth. She just wants to be sad. What a drama queen.
Year after year, her parents laughed these comments off. Without black, they reminded her, how could she disguise her glow? In reply, Savitri’s merry laugh, too, rang out. Yet once she was alone in the forest, her chuckles faded. Even a radiant heart could not burn away loneliness.
She spent her days far from the secured tourist walkways, tucked instead beneath the bowers of branches where she had once discovered a curtain of honeysuckle vines in perennial bloom. With dessert spoon and jar of homemade honeysuckle syrup in hand, she roamed, listening always to the buzzing of the honeybees.
Yellow and black like her, they droned profound secrets for those who knew how to hear them, and Savitri did. She learned all manner of things this way, such as how to be loyal for the greater good, that the sky changed color because its attendants continually traded out the different silk saris it wore, and, best of all, how to sing.
She sang for her parents, for the hue-switching heavens, for herself. She read fairy tales, epics, and legends and imagined performing them on a stage draped in velvet. But it wasn’t enough. She longed for a friend.
“What makes my heart so scary?” Savitri asked the bees one summer afternoon. She was now old enough to know the way she lived wasn’t normal, that most people had companions who spoke in words, and that most people’s parents didn’t isolate them from what they insisted was a harsh, intolerant world.
Few nowadays care for magic, daughter of the sun. The bees paused in their inspection of the honeysuckle vines to flit around her. Your kind often fears what it does not understand.
The miniature sun in Savitri’s chest ached. It flared, sending warm golden beams out her collar and along the straps of her ebony top. She crossed her arms, but still the luminescence spilled out.
Sensing her distress, the bees gathered around in a halo. Hers, they promised, was a heart meant to be shared with one who could not only bear her light but would even reflect it back at her.
One day, whispered the fairy tales, the epics, the legends all, one day, there would be such a person.
In gold, added an eavesdropping dragonfly. Everything in gold, in silver.
Before Savitri could press it for details, it had flown away, a burst of blue-green stained glass on the wind.
Years passed, and Savitri’s well of patience had run dry. She was tired: tired of hiding, tired of only ever witnessing the outside world through movies and television and snatches of tourists’ conversations. She dreamed of birthday parties with girls her age, of trading confessions like clothes, of dancing on a stage. What would it be like to sing her way down a crowded, mica-speckled city street, to wear black only because she chose to?
She yearned for someone who didn’t fear her brilliance. She yearned, she yearned, oh, how she yearned.
Even the gardens with their bowers of honeysuckle and their bees grew smaller and smaller, overfamiliar, until Savitri could barely breathe. Her sun heart threatened to break through her skin and limn the entire estate if nothing changed. No amount of black, whether pitch or raven, would be able to suppress it.
On the night before her seventeenth birthday, when the yearning had grown too strong to dismiss, she resolved to sneak out and sample the world for herself.
Once her parents were asleep, Savitri packed a small bag with a shawl, some cash, and a jar of syrup with a spoon. A small section of the former rana’s manor was available for rent to visiting historians, yet all the rooms but one sat vacant. She checked to make sure the visitors, a family of travel-weary researchers and their teenage son she’d only seen from afar, were snugly settled in. They seemed to be. That left only the evening receptionist at his desk in the lobby, where an ancient fan whirred overhead almost loudly enough to cover the clatter of his keyboard. The back door it would have to be.
But just as she reached the exit, the door clicked shut.
Had someone else been there? Savitri shivered as she murmured a quick prayer to the marble murti of Lord Ganesh, remover of obstacles. Then she followed on tiptoe.
Outside, the sky had donned its sari of smoke and stars, the bees and dragonflies slumbered, and the crickets’ choir had begun its nocturnal serenade. Savitri’s skin tingled with the thrill of being alive, of surveilling a stranger in the dark, and of course she needed no flashlight to make her way through the gloom, not when all she had to do was unbutton her collar.
Feeling dangerous, she stripped down to her tank top, tied her shirt about her waist, and ran.
The rush of sunlight dazzled even her own eyes, so it took her a minute to notice the surface of the lake. It twinkled with stars and with swans. Swans? She’d never seen them here before.
The swans shimmered in the darkness, as if lit by their own inner radiance. Graceful necks arched high, they formed a semicircle. Savitri crept closer. They were singing!
And at the edge of the water, his attention on the swans, knelt a boy.
>
Savitri very nearly missed him at first, for he blended into the night. He even sported a scrap of it, a beautiful black sherwani trimmed with silver that set off the warm brown of his cheeks.
“Satyavan,” sang the swans, the words like the dulcet strum of sitar strings. “Satyavan, come home.”
Satyavan. Savitri caught her breath at the name. She shouldn’t have unveiled her sunshine. Any second now, he would turn and spot her.
Any second. This was foolish. She should run.
Yet she stayed put and studied him, trapped in an eternity of anticipation, as the swans sang on, their voices melodic and enchanting, summoning him.
Satyavan slipped the tunic over his head and tossed it to the ground. Savitri must have made a sound, because in the next moment, he spun around.
The boy from the manor! The boy she’d thought asleep in his room.
His stare met hers, fitting together like a riddle and its answer.
Something opened between them, a bejeweled path. The future glittered there, mapped out in brilliant-cut gemstones, green and purple, orange and blue, and soldered in promise. This boy. She saw him there, in that future where she knew the taste of his mouth, the shape of his soul. He was hers, and she, his.
Who was he? This boy with eyes so dark they were almost black. Black like kajal. Black like mystery. Why was he here? Her heart flashed, highlighting the lake and the handsome boy standing before it.
“Satyavan,” called the swans once more, “Satyavan, come home.” One left the water and gleamed, and where a bird had been, on the sand now glided an apsara. The celestial dancer’s lovely face twisted in irritation. “Leave us, foolish girl. This is not for you.”
“What’s not for me?” Savitri asked, more intrigued than insulted. Not even the apsara’s otherworldly, beguiling beauty could wrench her gaze from Satyavan’s.
Instead of answering, the apsara glared at Satyavan. “Come now. My tolerance for this game runs low.”
But Satyavan smiled at Savitri. “Your light,” he said.
Her heart beat fiercely, sending golden rays over the lake until it was bright as day. A breath later, his bare chest began to glow, too—a soft silver like moonbeams.
The winged creatures’ prophecy: When the time was right, she would find the one who would reflect her light back at her, in gold and in silver. As if, she realized now, the moon harnessed the heat of the sun and returned it as a cool caress.
By the combined glint of moon and sun and the stars above, she saw confusion, then recollection, cross his features.
The apsara grabbed Satyavan’s shoulders and shook him. “Fool! I’m trying to free you!” She turned a pleading face to Savitri. “Enough. Time grows short. Let us go.”
Satyavan extricated himself from her hold. “Just a minute, Rambha.”
“You do not understand!” Rambha cried. “There is no time.” She gestured wildly toward the water. “Come now, or your brothers and I must leave without you.”
Satyavan’s face contorted as frustration, dread, and excitement all warred there. “You’re right,” he said at length, his voice oddly detached. As Savitri watched, he swam out into the lake—and vanished beneath the dark surface.
Her curiosity corroded into panic when he failed to reappear. One minute passed, two, then three. He was drowning! Why was the apsara just sitting there on the shore, calm as the lake that had swallowed him?
Savitri flung off her shoes, dropped her bag, and sprinted after Satyavan.
“Stop!” cried the apsara. “This boy is no boy but a devata, one of eight divine sons of Chandra, our lunar lord, cursed by a rishi to be reborn as a mortal to a family who cannot properly care for him.”
But it was too late. Savitri held her breath and dove into the lake, tracking the silver trail of light through the murky waters until she located Satyavan’s suspended form. The apsara’s words registered only as she emerged into the air, Satyavan safely in her grasp.
The apsara herself loomed over the water, hands fisted at her sides, her ethereal splendor no less seductive for her ire. “I begged to soften the curse,” she hissed. “At last the sage compromised: After seventeen years, each devata might drown, thus giving up this mortal form, and find his way home. The others ride with my sisters now; this one was prepared to join them.” Her spite coiled like a snake into her next sentence. “Until you ruined it.”
The remaining swans had already ascended into the clouds, and now the shades of the seven devata brothers could be seen mounted on their sleek, feathered backs. They melted as one into the moonlight.
“I was to bring him back,” the apsara spat, each word a bitter barb. “He cannot survive in this world of tears and tragedy. He will last perhaps a year, his suffering growing each day, and then expire. I hope you are pleased.” She raised both arms, feathers sprouting down their lengths, and once fully bird, took flight.
Savitri dragged Satyavan’s dripping form to the shore, where she let the warmth of her sun heart dry them both. Soon he opened his eyes. “You saved me.”
In that moment, she forgot her dreams of performing onstage. She forgot her urge to flee. She forgot everything but an end to her loneliness. A son of the moon for a daughter of the sun. Surely it was no coincidence.
“Stay,” said Savitri, and the single syllable sounded of longing, curiosity, and wonder. Now she would learn the taste of his mouth, the shape of his soul. She fed him dollops of her honeysuckle syrup. “You can’t die. I won’t let you.”
“Keep feeding me whatever that is,” agreed Satyavan, licking the spoon clean, “and I’ll stay here forever!”
When he gazed at her, humor giving way to something deeper, the moon in his black eyes illuminated the bejeweled path they would walk together.
They spent the remainder of the night talking and passing the jar of syrup back and forth, until the spoon became their fingers, and licking their fingers became feeding each other. They spoke of stories, of favorite movies, of fashion. They argued and agreed and argued again, until the sky changed its clothes once more, and then they hurried back onto the estate.
Satyavan, it turned out, remembered nothing about the apsaras who had come to claim him and his brother devatas or even why he’d gone to the lake in the first place; he knew only that Savitri, who lived in the former rana’s manor, had rescued him from a lethal midnight swim.
Savitri, however, hadn’t forgotten anything—certainly not the apsara’s warning—but she kept it to herself. After all, she had a year to find an answer.
And a year to get to know this boy she’d instantly recognized.
After breakfast had been served and cleared away, Savitri took Satyavan to her private arbor and read him fairy tales and illustrated volumes of myth. In return, he recited bawdy ballads and built her a sword out of twigs. At last, even adrenaline wasn’t enough to keep them up, and so they napped, curled around each other, heads cradled on a bed of moss, and watched over by the nectar-hunting bees, who continued to buzz confidences for those with the ears to hear.
A week passed in this way. It took little to convince Satyavan’s parents to extend their trip another fortnight. The shift in his mood from gloomy to gregarious was all the impetus they needed. When at last they left, they made arrangements for Satyavan to stay on as a guest of the estate, provided he study for his board exams while there. “I don’t know what you did,” Satyavan’s mother said to Savitri, “what magic you used, but I’ve never seen him so happy.”
Savitri only smiled. I chose him, she thought. It was what she’d told her own parents.
They’d exchanged a frown. “Are you sure that’s wise? This stranger? Does he know—”
“Yes,” she said firmly. She didn’t add how once she turned eighteen, board exams or no, Satyavan and she would run away to the city and wear gold and silver and sing for their suppers. How they had already begun to compose their own show. She didn’t want to think about her birthday. There was time for that yet.
; And so the months passed, made bright and sweet with lighted diyas, rainbow rangoli, and silver leaf–topped treats for Deepavali; tossed colors and mischief for Holi; and parties and songs and picnics and horror-movie marathons for everything else. Savitri strung fairy lights in their bower, where they shared honeysuckle kisses and debated philosophy and nibbled on the savory snacks Satyavan made in the kitchen.
“I never met anyone I could fight with like you,” he said wonderingly one sunny afternoon as they sat in the bower, notepads in hand, honeybees humming above, and debated adding an extra line to a song in their show. “It’s fun! It makes me think about what I really believe and not just what I thought I did.”
“I like it, too,” Savitri admitted. “But Himanshu still doesn’t need that extra line, sorry.” She nestled against Satyavan’s side.
“Yes, he does. If he doesn’t say anything, it sounds like he doesn’t care Anjali’s just leaving him behind.”
“No, it doesn’t. He’s so shocked that she would abandon him, he can’t speak. His heart’s breaking.” Savitri wrinkled her nose at him. “It’s pathos.”
Satyavan mirrored the gesture. “Extra line. Let me have it, and you can have Anjali’s bonus solo.”
“Fine,” said Savitri, and pouted. But her heart shone, belying her grumpiness.
“I was so bored before you came along; you have no idea.” Satyavan put down his notepad and stroked her hair. “I just wanted to disappear.”
Guilt slid between Savitri’s ribs like a sharp blade. She should tell him the real reason he’d felt that way. But what if once he knew, he left?
She couldn’t stand to be alone again, not after she’d found the person who both reflected her and whose silly jokes never failed to make her laugh and her parents groan, whose knowledge of everything from medieval banana-tree harvesting techniques to obscure regional-cooking lore astounded her, whose intuitive understanding of music stirred her own inner melody.
Not when she still yearned to kiss Satyavan in the rain, the droplets drenching their clothes and making them huddle closer. To accompany him on a butterfly walk at the estate’s newly installed conservatory and choose their favorites. To perform their completed show in public while shining like the sun, while glowing like the moon—to be magic, unfettered, unmasked, for the whole world to see.
