The love-bugs

by Rongili Biswas 

 

Love-bugs, I call them, though they have nothing to do with love. They come in late Autumn. Hordes of them. And go round and round in circles around a source of light. They want to singe their wings, burn themselves to death, they make the buzz of their circling sound unreal.

 

Dark moths, I call them. Though they have nothing to do with moths. They come when evening descends. Or at nightfall. Over the shoulder of a neighbouring tree that has splayed its hands towards heaven. As if in votive offerings. Its avid religiosity clasped in a gesture of genuflection that has gone awry.

 

They live in dark corners in the hounding daylight. In musty leaf litters. Or, in crannies of the bark that nameless trees offer them. Almost whispering, I call them – ‘pappataci’. Though I know more than anyone else that they have nothing to do with those wilful midges. Both my whisper and the soughing of the wind are lost on them.

 

Their whirls seem an act of atonement, for some wrong they have never done.

 

I find them stricken with a grief that they do not know how to shake off. And I see grace oozing out of their tiny bodies in the gathering dusk.

 

I think of an unusually quiet night. A blue one like none other. ‘Over strand and field’. Over the clear sky, the transparent wind, and the forlorn shrubs. Reddened with bruises. Teeming with sighs. And blackened with immured pain.

 
The love-bugs, going round and round in circles,
                                        move towards eternity.