Monarchs, for example, creating feeling of anxiety

Usage examples of butterflies.

To begin at the beginning: On the morning of his fortieth birthday, in a room full of butterflies, Mirza Saeed Akhtar watched his sleeping wife.

Getting up quietly, he slipped his feet into chappals and strolled idly along the verandas of the great mansion, still in darkness on account of their lowered blinds, and the butterflies bobbed like courtiers at his back.

This remote region had always been renowned for its lepidoptera, for these miraculous squadrons that filled the air by day and night, butterflies with the gift of chameleons, whose wings changed colour as they settled on vermilion flowers, ochre curtains, obsidian goblets or amber finger-rings.

In the zamindar's mansion, and also in the nearby village, the miracle of the butterflies had become so familiar as to seem mundane, but in fact they had only returned nineteen years ago, as the servant women would recall.

Since the death of Bibiji one hundred and twenty years ago the butterflies had vanished into the same realm of the legendary as Bibiji herself, so that when they came back exactly one hundred and one years after their departure it looked, at first, like an omen of some imminent, wonderful thing.

So the return of the butterflies lifted many spirits, but when the expected wonders failed to materialize the locals sank back, little by little, into the insufficiency of the day-to-day.

The villagers and the zamindar's family had long ago abandoned the attempt to exclude the butterflies from their homes, so that now whenever a trunk was opened, a batch of wings would fly out of it like Pandora's imps, changing colour as they rose.

On the morning of his fortieth birthday, however, as the first light of dawn touched the house and the butterflies began instantly to glow, the beauty of the moment took his breath away.

The magic butterflies were resting on her exposed toes, and a mosquito had evidently found its way inside as well, because there was a line of little bites along the raised edge of her collar--bone.

The young woman wore a saffron yellow sari wrapped around her nakedness, after the fashion of the poor women of that region, and as she stooped over the butterflies the sari, hanging loosely forwards, bared her small breasts to the gaze of the transfixed zamindar.

The strangest aspect of it was that the butterflies seemed to be funnelling downwards from the brightening air, going willingly towards her outstretched palms and their own deaths.

Then people heard about her new habit of swallowing butterflies and they revised their opinion of her, convinced that she was touched in the head and therefore dangerous to lie with in case the demons crossed over into her lovers.

Only the butterflies were ignored, like hopes long since shown to be false.

Then in the dream he fell asleep, out cold as if somebody pulled out the plug, and when dreamed himself awake again she was standing in front of him with that loose white hair and the butterflies clothing her: transformed.

Had he been sincere in the reasons he gave his wife, or was he simply finding a way of leaving the coast clear for his pursuit of the madonna of the butterflies, the epileptic, Ayesha?