Butterflies can be distinctly diabolical

They are symbols of grace, but these insects have qualities that do not make it to children’s colouring books

The air is tepid, almost syrupy, laden with the heaviness of old trees breathing. It has the odour of dank mud, decaying wood and things growing. There is something primal, vital about the rainforest that will not leave your nostrils.

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Forests can be unnervingly silent. Not so today, at Assam’s Dihing Patkai National Park. The gloom is permeated with the cacophony of buzzing cicadas, croaking frogs, screaming hornbills, scurrying mammals, breaking twigs, whispering wings, and the drum of ants’ feet marching through leaf litter. Even the trees throb with sound if you put your ears to their bole. And behind it all, the steady patter of an incessant drizzle. The noise spirals upward, dashes against the impenetrable canopy and tumbles back to earth.

The towering trunks and massive buttressed roots make me feel fleeting, inconsequential. There are things to learn here. We think of trees as rooted beings but they travel, sometimes far from where they were born. Some live forever. They can eat light, for god’s sake!

But even here are patches of open clearings of silent grass and ponds. Here, light surges in and something otherworldly reveals itself. Floating, wings outstretched, in a rain-dotted pond is a great hornbill. Its massive yellow casque and bill like an overturned country boat. And riding on a fallen giant, gently sipping its life juices, is a silent swarm of exquisite vampires: butterflies.

We tend to think of butterflies as ethereal creatures built of light. Cultural symbols of everything from grace and love to inspirational transformation. Capable of no harm, and feeding on just that purest of foods, nectar. But they have a dark side that we do not often comprehend. A side that would not make it to children’s colouring books.

Think of it. If concentrated sugar water was all you drank, wouldn’t you be short of the multitude of chemicals needed to keep a life running? And their only form of intake is sipping moisture through a long proboscis.