Balance of Fragile Things

by Olivia Chadha

  Maija asked Papaji to sit in the front as Paul would drive home, but he insisted on the backseat, next to the kids.

  As they drove home, Paul looked at his father’s reflection in the rearview mirror. Papaji was taking in the scenery, and Paul imagined he was probably looking for monkeys in the trees or for signs of snakes in the tall grasses.

  On the Wing

  Watching

  Posted on October 9

  Watching is patience magnified. If you are fortunate enough to see a butterfly’s spectacular flight, you have to resist the desire to run after it; if you do, you will look like a fool. Let her come to you; she’s coy. The most successful watching occurs when you catch her off-guard, while she’s devouring her lunch, a decaying piece of fruit, or slurping flower nectar or a salty puddle of water. Her eyes are poor. Butterflies and moths are beautiful to our dingy world, but imagine what they look like to one another. They see ultraviolet colors, colors beyond the spectrum of our eyes. They are also nearsighted. The flowers stand out to them like flashing landing pads awaiting their arrival. The vegetation absorbs ultraviolet light, making them stand out. Their predators—birds, reptiles—can’t see UV light, so this is their secret language. Because of her poor sight, it is easy to get close to her while she consumes her liquid diet. Her utensil of choice: a straw-like proboscis. I heard about a Postman butterfly, which got its name from its fixed flower route. From flower to flower, they drink the same nectar every day of their short lives. What a spectacular creature of habit.

  Or, if you are even luckier, you will see a chrysalis freshly opened and the young adult, new to the world, pumping its blood through its wings readying for its first flight. The chrysalis tears open gently, the adult butterfly breaks free of the shell, and it veins expand the little sails. Its damp wings are like the curled lips of a clamshell. You feel honored to see its transformation. Change takes time. She zips her proboscis together like two sides of a straw, if she’s lucky to have the ability to eat. Some, like the Atlas moth, are born without mouths. It seems an odd product of nature, an adult emerging after such a process only to lay eggs and die three days later. It is so ephemeral. A watcher bearing witness is graced.

  But where are they? The answer is: everywhere. If it’s cool, they rest beneath branches, warming their bodies. If it’s warm, they are flitting low above grasses, flowers, trees, and puddles. When one catches your eye, it’s because you showed patience to nature, and she is offered as a gift. They are the fairies in our world, pixies in the human realm. Their stained-glass windows so brilliant and whimsical we can’t help but remember that this is what matters. You hold your breath and forget where you were rushing off to mere moments before. They are the sirens of the world we used to live in, the one we could live in.

  If you get the chance to meet a butterfly in the wild when it’s consuming a meal, you can look closely at its eyes, two orbs of glass with worlds inside. The light refracting through its opaque wings. Or, the edge of its hind leg fringed with tears and nibbles from battles lost. Look even closer at her almost imperceptible scales, each a different-colored sequin. Or observe how it carries on the wind, higher and higher, coasting on a mini current, then dives like a nervous debutante, shy at her first dance. They are nature in its moving state; it’s only when you are quiet that she will reveal herself to you. Or perhaps she is watching you with her false eyespot when she is in prayer. To see her in flight is a gift—to see them in a glass case, drained of life, is like visiting the skeleton of a once-pretty girl.

  Sightings

  Here is a list of my butterfly sightings by memory, so they might not be accurate, and I do not have the exact dates, only the seasons. This list is far from complete, but a start is a start.

  Elfin: Large black eyes lined in white, smaller than most leaves. Its scales glitter purple and green across its dusty brown wings.

  Blue Copper: Iridescent on forewings: open grassy field. I almost got it confused with a blue, but it is much larger.

  Eastern Tailed-Blue: It was a blue in size (tiny) and had two commas of orange on the edge of its wing and tufty tails the size of raindrops on the edge of its hind wing. It was drinking from a daisy-looking flower in the flats.

  Spicebush Swallowtail: This is the largest butterfly I’ve seen, spanning the length of my hand relaxed. It has green tones on brown/black wings and bright yellow shades on the edges of the wings. It was drinking from a spicebush.

  Little Yellow: The difference between a sulphur and a Yellow is their antennae. Yellows’ antennae are black and white, while sulphurs’ are pink.

  Common Sootywing: It was like its name, dark in complexion. The wings were soft black/brown and flecked with white spots. It sat like skippers do, wings spread back, easily mistaken by the untrained eye for a moth.

  Unnamed Blue: I still have yet to identify the invertebrate I found not too long ago, in a ravine in a suburban area. It is a blue, tiny in size, with white circles lined in black near its hind wing. Wings are fringed with white, and there is a deep brownish tone under the violet blue color (the left and right are different colors). To me, it looks like a mutant.

  To my present plight, I wonder if anyone has anything further to offer. I still haven’t been able to determine an identity for my finding. I wonder if, perhaps, the creature is not a product of nature but a creation of man’s doing. A Frankenstein butterfly.

  2 COMMENTS

  You should get the Peterson’s Guide; it’s comprehensive. Also, don’t forget that the environment could be responsible for affecting the butterfly. I know it sounds wild, but it’s possible. Have you looked into environmental causes? —BF Girl NY

  Thanks, BF Girl! I will get the book and look into external effects. —Vic

  Papaji

  Days later, during breakfast, Papaji looked at the backyard, through the kitchen window from the comfort of the dining table. His gaze had intent, as though sight itself was something he’d discovered only recently. He watched how the rain fell downward from heaven, as it usually did, but somehow the force of its landing seemed to pull the ground upward with each heavy drop. The raindrops’ recoil splattered mud on the side of the house; gutters bloated with leaves and muck; muddy craters opened in the earth; grass became flooded rice fields; oak leaves not yet ready to fall spun across a large puddle in the backyard. Low areas under trees turned into seas, and bubbles rose to the surface and burst like translucent bombs.

  His eyes meandered over the empty plates his daughter-in-law had placed on the table, and he hoped her anddá wouldn’t be as hard and rubbery as the eggs that Tata, the cook, made for him in the flat in Delhi—those grayish-yellow balls of clay. Tata didn’t know the first thing about food preparation, and in Papaji’s mind he should have been either shot or relegated to the realm of tea preparation alone. Maija looked nothing like an Indian woman, with her wild hair and blue jeans. He wondered what Paul saw in her. But when she placed the perfectly jiggly eggs—like two cheerful breasts—in front of him, he couldn’t help but purse his lips and offer a small nod.

  It had been raining for five days straight since his arrival. He told the family that each day of rain represented a different member of the Singh household. No one seemed to understand what he meant, but they all nodded their heads and smiled at the breakfast table when he said this. He repeated his statement once more in his thick Punjabi accent, this time with his right pointer finger extended high above his scrambled eggs: “Each day is for ik person. Isabella has the first day, okay? Vic has the second and so on. My day is today.” Much to his delight, they responded with smiles of agreement. He would have a good time while he was here.

  “But who will have tomorrow?” Isabella asked with scrambled eggs in her mouth.

  “If it rains tomorrow and the next, we will have a visitor,” he said. And his American family seemed satisfied with this answer.

  Home. So this was where his remaining family lived. Papaji had seen many homes, so many walls over his life, though h
e longed for only one home. That home, lost so very long ago during the great fissure that forced him south into India, was truly gone forever. It represented a time when the evil in the world was merely fiction in a cautionary tale, buried in a dusty book out of reach. Innocence, on some level, he’d left in the mortar between the walls, in the tiled floor, and with his family’s worldly possessions. He’d left his innocence in the memories of his wife and first son, still pure before their journey. Home, home, home. His longing drove him, on occasion, mad. It became a phantom that haunted him like the ghost of a deceased loved one. It whispered in his ear and became embedded in his flesh.

  Papaji was not comfortable in this house. He’d noticed Paul hadn’t looked him in the eyes since he arrived. Not once. It had been a long time since he’d seen his son. He hoped that they would come together now, as they should have long ago. He’d imagined time and again as he planned this trip that they would talk about politics and India and farming, as they should have done when Paul was a child. Papaji had crafted scenes of their reunion that consisted of tears and apologies. Perhaps he dreamed this scenario so often that he thought it was a true possibility.

  He hoped Paul would come around. Paul could be working too hard, or maybe he wasn’t eating well, he thought. Perhaps it was depression from the rain that made him so angry. Papaji himself always experienced a bout of sadness during the annual monsoon downpour in India. The village celebrated when it began because it put an end to the dry season; young and old would run out into the pelting rain and let the shower clean the dust from their clothes. After a week of merciless rain, the roads would become flooded, mudslides would commence, and the same village would curse the skies for their inexorable fury. From dry to wet, content to misery, the interconnectivity between humankind and nature was evident to Papaji. Since he arrived, he had been looking forward to taking a short walk in the woods to get a closer look at the trees and the wildlife, but because of the constant downpour he could only stare at the few trees gathered in the backyard through the fogged-up windows. One of them would have to give: Paul, himself, or the weather.

  It was dark all the time in Cobalt. What a sad place. The clouds seemed to push down closer and closer to the ground each day, leaving pockets of mist and fog in nooks and crevices around hills and curbs. It was an altogether messy sort of rain.

  “Pea soup, hánji,” Paul said as he flicked an angry hand at the outside.

  Papaji peered down at the soil through the thick, double-paned glass. This American earth wasn’t made for the monsoon. It was not sturdy or porous enough. The soil flipped and flopped like over-whipped egg whites and deflated and farted when the air ran out of it. Papaji’s Indian earth was different, stronger. Sure, their floods and torrential storms sunk their cities and villages, but they always rose again like a forgotten Atlantis. Here in Cobalt, the streets and drains didn’t suck the water; they seemed to pour the water back into the streets with garbage from underneath. He’d seen this phenomenon through the front window in the living room. The drain on Peregrine Court was coughing up murky waters like an old man clearing his lungs. The concrete might cave in, and the trees might lift up and out of the ground on their own and walk away, roots in tow. Over-watered land with no irrigation and a town on the verge of being swallowed by its own bowels—what civil engineer built this place? No care for details, no planning for the future. Whoever it was, he was a goonda and should be run out of town with nothing but his under kaccha.

  “A monsoon so late?” he asked. He used a pencil he’d found next to the kitchen computer to scratch his scalp under his white turban. Vic began to explain the differences between this rainstorm and the monsoon Papaji was familiar with in the Punjab, but in the middle of his treatise, he stopped talking altogether. Papaji caught sight of Paul’s clenched jaw and squinting eyes.

  “If your puttar wants to tell me how the world works, that’s fine, Ikpaul.” He glared at Paul.

  “He’s a smart boy, Papaji.” Paul looked down at his plate.

  “If he takes after you, I think not,” Papaji mumbled and turned away from his son. He felt terrible the moment the words exited his mouth. Though Papaji tried to be civil, he found it difficult to change his old ways. He’d hated what his son represented for so long that he’d forgotten what it was like to see him as a person.

  In Papaji’s mind, there was an ongoing discussion: a here and a there. Here things were new and strange. He looked forward to viewing the American soaps like The Young and the Restless and General Hospital; they came highly recommended by his cousin. He liked the voice of Tanya Earhart, Channel 9’s meteorologist. He hoped to find out why Paul came and stayed in America. And he was somewhat cheerful about the possibility that he would be under the care of a good doctor soon for his leg and foot pain.

  There, on the other hand—in India—life was familiar. The noises, smells, and overall congestion set him at ease. But the flat that stored all the Singh family’s aging relatives, from Uncle Chand, whose stomach problems left a foul odor surrounding him, to Massy Sukminder, whose joints were almost completely locked straight, made him feel old. He wasn’t dying like they were; he just had an old injury. His foot and leg throbbed daily. Shocking pain shot up and down his limbs with lightning precision. His son rather than his daughter would help. Girls left home to worry about their husband’s relatives, but sons were always there for their fathers. Paul: his American son. He looked at Paul and his family. Even though they were Americanized and half-Latvian and mostly wore glasses, they looked like a good family.

  Paul turned the TV on. The small box in plastic wood paneling sat on a lazy Susan so it could turn toward the living room or kitchen. The morning news was on, and weather forecasters were having a ball with their time in the limelight—the only ones who were giddy about the gloom. Tanya Earhart, the heart-faced meteorologist, set aside a few more minutes during every hourly newscast to update the quantity of rainfall. There were three inches so far. Tanya made good use of her extra time to teach the public some meteorological vocabulary. Virga, they all learned, was the term for rain that falls and evaporates before it lands. Papaji had seen virga many times but never knew the word for the streaks of clouds that hung halfway across the sky. Papaji watched very closely when Tanya spoke. Her long hair was teased for height, her lips glossy like two rows of pomegranate seeds. He felt that learning English was important, so he repeated the word under his breath, veergha, and made a note to attempt to use the word sometime in the near future.

  After breakfast he moved to a love seat in the living room, where he sipped his small cup of tea and nibbled on a cheese puff. His feet, bare and calloused, sat atop a pouf while he waited for the package to arrive with his life savings. He had bundled the rupees and a few other important things, wrapped them in plastic, and placed the bundle in a small box, also wrapped in brown paper and secured with almost an entire roll of packaging tape. He’d insured the package and sent it with the highest priority the post office in India offered, which was the speed post international rate.

  Papaji’s exercise was a slow walk to the mailbox on the sidewalk, twenty feet or so from the house. He opened an umbrella, wrapped himself in his brown wool cardigan, slid on his worn leather sandals, and shuffled to the curb. He leaned to the left ever so slightly to keep his weight lifted from his aching limb. He opened the aluminum mailbox and brought in the bills, junk mail, and some important-looking notices from the Publishers Clearing House and left them in the catchall in the foyer.

  It was probably the humid air that made his joints swell like small balloons, but still he tried to smile when Maija brought him another cup of tea with two aspirin tink-tinking on the side of the saucer. The sky continued to threaten to downpour. If it wasn’t raining, it was about to; if it finished raining, the sky would sigh relief and expose a grayish blue. The sun and all its effects were just becoming memories tucked away in a different dimension.

  As Papaji sipped his tea, Vic sat beside him. Papaji
looked at him closely and saw his fairly new clothes, sneakers, and jacket and thought how expensive these clothes must have been.

  “Things are easy here, for you all, I mean. No farm, everything inside, safe, secure.”

  “Did you need a shotgun? I mean, for protection and stuff?” Vic asked with wide eyes.

  The old man sat deeper into the couch. “In the Punjab you needed to be ready for, what’s the word? Dacoits and budmash.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They rob you in your sleep and kidnap the women. Very bad men, bahut kharáb.”

  “Thieves? Did you learn how to fight, Papaji?

  “Yes, we had to protect ourselves.”

  “Was there a da—?”

  “Dacoit.”

  “Was there a dacoit in your village?”

  “Not just any dacoit—the most terrible in all the land. His name was Harzarah Singh. Some said when he was very young he drank the blood of a viper and filled with evil. I just think it was greed, and he was págal, crazy.” Papaji wound his pointer finger at his temple. “But even Harzarah Singh could not rival the chaos that came with the Partition. It claimed even the sharpest men.”

  Papaji took another sip of tea. “See, I grew up there, potrá, my father moved to Rawalpindi before I was born, and Bebbeji’s family was from the area. It wasn’t easy to just go go go. That’s why I stayed. No one knew if this, this Partition, would come or if we could return once India was separated from Pakistan. I couldn’t leave our home unprotected. I sent Bebbeji and Kamal to the village long before. There they met with other family members who also were going to rebuild. I stayed alone.”

  He put down his tea. “I locked up the valuables we had in one room. We gathered, the ones who stayed, and watched over each other. My friend and neighbor, Aaqib, said he would watch over the house and told me to go. But I couldn’t.”

  “Why did you have to go? Why didn’t he?”