Even when the air was still, the lake kept washing over its edges and receding in a strange rhythm. It was as if it had a beating heart in its depths. I liked to think that it did.
I started out that morning, to walk around the Hadosiddapura lake, past the Eucalyptus plantation and to find some un-walked earth to wander on. Instead I sat by the shore till afternoon. That November it had rained down unusually hard when I was there in Bangalore. A good number of lakes were running full to the brim, spilling over onto the adjacent roadways. The car journeys through this city now seemed to get progressively eternal. I was staying at The Bhoomi College for a few days, and on some mornings, I walked behind the campus and spent most of my time by the Hadosiddapura lake. This lake, which is as of now safely tucked away in the suburbs, too had breached its banks and had more water this year than I had ever seen in it.
My body is nearly cold-blooded. It is accustomed to getting warmed up early in the morning and then lulled by the soporific Chennai heat by midday. But here in the outskirts of Bangalore, I stroll around with my palms deep in my pockets and with a pair of thick ear muffs on, even at around 11 in the morning, as here the Sun rises, no doubt, everyday but actually appears only occasionally. The ambient warmth has any speakable intensity only past noon, and my chill numbed skin waits for this eagerly like the Agamas and Garden Lizards under the rocks.
Most Indian cities grew around the waters of rivers. Bangalore came to be among, once hundreds of, its lakes.
It was the season of butterfly migration. Hundreds were seen in the sky flying in from the East. At this time of the day, damp soggy patches of mud near the lake’s shore, into which water seeps into horizontally under the ground, become dry enough for butterflies to perch on. On such select spots, as one wanders along the water’s periphery, there would suddenly be a splash of Grass yellows and Common Emigrants, plus a few Swordtails or Albatrosses ( When I take children on walks it so happens that when I point out an Albatross all of them turn their gazes to the firmament, before knowing that it’s a butterfly. For a Common Leopard the reactions are more pronounced before learning about the misnomer). In these congregations, all the butterflies would have their lengthy proboscises bent upward and then vertically down about quarter way into the drenched mud, like they were using those straws which could be turned about on their top ends.
Emigrants laying eggs
If any shadow fleeted over these shifting and shuffling salt drinking insects, either mine as I tried to crawl forward closer to them as quietly as I could, or that of a Brahminy Kite quartering over the lake, or sometimes even those of the Eucalyptus trees swaying a bit too hard in the breeze, the whole crowd of butterflies would all at once jump up in a fit of panic and fly helter-skelter right above their mudpuddling spot. The larger species like the Emigrants or the Albatrosses may scoot off to a different spot once disturbed, but the Grass yellows will just prance about a couple of feet from the ground for a minute, and then settle back onto the same place and stick their proboscises back in.
A local man brought his cattle to graze along the lake. They were country breeds and a few Jungle mynahs rode on their humps and caught flies from inside their ears. One scrawny bull kept trying to mount one cow after another and the cowherd gave it a loud whack with his stick. Probably he already had enough animals to care for. Later I found the butterflies mudpuddling inside many of the hoof prints they had left behind.
The spread of scrubland nearby the lake hosts
several large healthy Tanner’s Cassia plants (Senna auriculata) to which female
emigrants were flocking to, to lay their eggs. All were flitting about in
search of the best leaves. The males would spend many hours mudpuddling by the
waterbody and then skip away in a fervent spurt towards to Cassias to find
themselves a female to woo. On two corners of the lake, cranes were at work, lifting up and passing giant metal beams. Tall apartments were closing in on this water body too.
After a while I got up from the dampened mud, wandered
here and there, and sat down on the sand near a large Cassia. It is a bush
which grows spherically, sending its branches equally in all directions. For a
mature plant, the stem is completely inaccessible from outside. If you trim its
branches, it will grow even more densely, making sure the knives couldn’t penetrate
through leafage the next time. The Emigrant caterpillars are the same hue of
green as the Senna leaves and have the habit of laying themselves right along
the midribs which makes them difficult to spot.
The Cassia does something smart to save its flowers from the gobs of the caterpillars. It grows them on stalks separate from the leaves and as exposed as possible, making sure that if a caterpillar climbs onto a flower it becomes the most visible morsel. Also, the top most branches grow more flowers than the ones sticking out from underneath. The Emigrant larvae, from what I have seen, are themselves not very fond of eating the flowers and can I suppose that it is because they know that will stand out in rich contrast on its bright yellow petals to all the beasts which pass by the plant? The Cassia blossoms are edible though and is also part of natural medicine (Avaram poo in Tamil). I have a particular taste for the Rasam made from boiling them, but the dish goes untouched by everyone else in the family.
Large Carpenter Bees with furry yellow backs are very fond of Senna flowers too and they fly gracefully to them, with their fat bodies hanging down vertically from their overworked wings. You shift your head to one side hearing a buzz approaching, to dodge a Bee right in time from ramming straight into the back of your head. But the insect would be flying quite higher up in the air. Their bass buzzing, when it is not too far away, has a non-directional quality to it. And have you noticed when a Carpenter Bee is about to take off from a flower? It starts to buzz even before its wings carry it away. Like its whole body was firstly a resonance chamber, a singing cavity.
The male Commons Emigrants are drab fluorescent green. And if one strains one’s eyes enough, one may observe that there is also a faded hatching of brown all over their wings, like it was done with a blunt color pencil. The females can be said apart from a glance. They look tanned yellow and sport rusty spots on their hindwings. But even if I were color blind, it would be as easy to tell apart the ladies from the boys during this season, just by the way they fly. The males fly with a jerky impulsive mood, while they gallivant about for females. Sometimes I come across a male left in a dizzy daze when one more female flies by while it was pursuing another, unable to decide which one to go behind. And it is not uncommon to see an airborne party of three or four males in a reckless undulating pursuit of a single female. In such a chase, the males equally invest their energies in keeping up with the girl, and brawling and knocking over one another.
This is a pursuit I always find worthwhile and educating. To find a plant and spend time beside it, befriend it and let it reveal the forest within itself. Letting the plant grow vast, from horizon to horizon. Letting it fill my awareness, so that one could wander in its foliage and be lost in it for sometime. It could be a plant, or it could be anything at all. One could frame it for oneself. In the practice of Vipassana, a timeless Indian technique of meditation revived by the Buddha, one spends the first several days paying attention to the tiny space between the nostrils and the upper lip. At first perception feels barren. But as one’s awareness intensifies, one starts being intrigued by the play of breath, the way its force wavers, at times shallow, at times deep, at times almost nonexistent, sometimes in sudden spurts. The way respiration passes into and out of volition. The way breath periodically shifts from one passage to the other, the sensations it causes as it sweeps over the skin as it flows in and out. The tensing and relaxing of muscles, the pauses in between. All the sensations which spontaneously rise, persist and fade away, creating all manner of stimuli and feelings. All this becomes highly resolved and this minute space becomes an expansive field in the canvas of one’s attention. And so too, by intensifying the light of one’s awareness, the face of a single leaf or the scope of a single plant can be stretched like a vast mural.
“To see a World in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And
Eternity in an hour…”
- William Blake
A diverse deck of hungry mouths appear on the Cassias
just during the time when the Emigrants are breeding. The lairs of the Social
spiders remind me of eerie white neurons from biology textbooks, radiating
their spindly processes and clasping onto whatever they can touch. A month back
these spiders had their webs put up elsewhere, knotting together clumps of dry
broom grass. A couple of new webs have appeared recently on the crown of the plant
which now is patched with the carcasses of female Emigrants, mostly mummified
and patrolled by eight legged troopers. One or two insects are still twitching
and convulsing to break free of the strands holding it, while more spiders
fumble along to the extremities of the web to grab them down. Usually one
seldom gets to see these creatures as they are strongly averse to showing their
heads out of their central strongholds during the day. Probably at night as
well. They are known to have cannibalistic tendencies, where the younger lot have
been observed to nab some of their senile kin if the larder runs dry. So, it is
not unlikely that occasionally they can stay in all week surviving on their grandparents.
But here the whole tribe seems to be out and busy during this butterfly bounty.
But take your face too close and they start turning around and crawling in
again.
Social spiders snaring Emigrants
The legs of Green and White crab spiders can be seen folded over every tenth leaf while they hang like sloths under them, waiting to make a catch. The black gem-eyed juveniles of Hunting spiders have no need for hiding themselves. At their leisure, they crawl to the freshly laid eggs, for which they are spoilt for choice, reach up to their tips, bite in and suck them up like tender coconuts. The crumpled shells are left behind.
The predator I find most interesting stalking the Cassia, feed on the butterfly’s larvae. A plant whose leaves and the ground beneath are strewn with the shriveled carcasses of caterpillars may bespeak the presence of these carnivorous insects. These are Predator bugs. The adult is a mottled brown while the nymph has a black and red carapace, like a tribal hunting mask. It crawls meticulously up and down every stalk and leaf in search of caterpillars. It is a vampire among bugs, and instead of diabolic teeth it wields a sword like rostrum, a murderous straw, which it stabs the green larvae with, right through the middle of the torso and then draws the hemolymph warm out of the living creature as it writhes. When there is no more juice left in the creature, it tosses it aside and the bug is off to find itself another.
Predator bug devouring a caterpillar
As these scenes go on, mating pairs of Emigrants can be found in the grasses and shrubbery. And as a result, all the terminal leaves of the Cassias look like they have contracted some kind pox, as they are everywhere saturated with white Pierid eggs.
I have often felt reluctant to return to
civilization from this little patch of scrub. Or the way of life these grasses
and bushes offer during these brief wanderings. All the assumed identities feel
distant. The facades feel distant. All purpose and ‘striving toward’ seem far
far away, not just spatially. My being walks bare and naked and heals. Walking
barefoot, I imagine connecting with the mycorrhizal network beneath me, and
everywhere. I let in the trees, the lake, the soil, the birds and the sky and
‘I’ at times is no longer.
Gathering of Grass Yellows by the lake
- M.Yuvan
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