Maps for Lost Lovers

changed colour in keeping with the seasons: in spring they were the bright green of budding leaves, but in summer they were darker, the colour of mature foliage, and while they were a pale yellow-brown at the beginning of autumn when the leaves were beginning to turn, with hints of pinks and reds here and there, they became and stayed wholly brown for the rest of autumn and winter, the cycle beginning again the following spring.
    She knocked several times on the door but there was no sign of life inside the house; she hesitated and then went in.
    Inside, the walls were decorated with pinned butterflies in glass frames that appeared to be strays from Paradise. The girl—carrying the little wooden stars—didn’t yet know that some of the butterflies she was looking at had stood at the centre of man’s interest since their discovery, the glinting creatures named after the heroes and heroines of Greek mythology and the queens of the great maritime powers, that at one time some of the rare specimens had been paid for with gold and others used as royal gifts. She moved around the room, slowly, and then came to a standstill. There were ten dead butterflies on the sky-blue table before her. They were large and belonged to the same species, the bodies as long as match-sticks, the wings breathtakingly lovely to her, and she—the girl dressed in straw-yellow—lowered her head to examine them. The charcoal-black forewings were rounded ovals while the outline of each hind wing was tear-shaped and had three thin spurs protruding from the base; the forewings were marked with white bars, and each hind wing—although the same colour and pattern as the forewings on the whole—had a circle the size of a ten-pence piece on it, divided into three vivid bands, one berry red, the middle one blue, and the lowest yellow, a thin streak from this yellow band emerging and flowing deep into each of the three spurs.
    She contemplated them with a serious and absorbed expression as though about to whisper a magical formula to reverse death. And, inexplicably, as she looked at the ten luxuriant insects, she began to think of how her mother, after she had washed her hair, liked to prepare a brazier of smouldering incense, cover it with a small upturned basket and then lie down for half an hour with her head resting on its base, her eyes closed in lassitude, her long hair collected about the sloping sides of the basket, the warm fragrant smoke escaping through the weave to simultaneously perfume and dry the locks, a few stray wisps of the smoke climbing onto her forehead and dancing there as though, below, her brain and thoughts were on fire.
    Wondering what had triggered the memories concerning her mother’s hair, the girl realized that the wings of the dead butterflies issued a fine odour, the scent of garments stored in jasmine and sandal, of dark hair dried in incense and gentle musk.
    The girl’s face hung above the ten butterflies and the sky-blue rectangle of the table’s surface, and she wondered where Jugnu was. She was eight when Jugnu arrived from America—twenty-three years younger than him—and had grown up thinking of him as an uncle like almost every other child in the neighbourhood. She had sometimes heard people say that his was an unconventional family. Once a woman said it wouldn’t surprise her if she was told that some member of this family, after he had died and been made ready for burial, had suddenly sat upright to tear the shroud away from him, not wishing to be bound by any tradition or custom even then. He loved butterflies and the butterflies loved him equally in return, gathering around him as though around a rose, and, said a number of children, although they were his passion, whenever their fluttering hampered his daily routines he collected them all in the palm of his hand and swallowed them, but he soon began to miss them and, growing sad, brought them out of his mouth one by one to fly about him once again.
    Just before Chanda entered the back garden, Jugnu had been studying the charcoal-black butterflies that lay on the table. Bhutanitis lidderdalii. Bhutan Glory. A relative of the Festoon butterflies, the species was extremely precious and listed in the Red Data Book: Threatened Swallowtail Butterflies of the World. It lived in the eastern part of the Himalayas, in Bhutan and adjoining Assam, and also in one locality in Burma, its natural habitat being mountains and mountain valleys where tall trees