AS WE ENTER Namdapha National Park and Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh, where sunlight first touches the Indian subcontinent, we begin to see them: butterflies, mostly solitary, sometimes in a tiny group, indifferent to us but also quick to levitate. The brochures have prepared us for this—this forest has more than two hundred species of butterflies—and they arrive like good employees: saffron, koh-i-noor, yellow vein lancer, zigzag flat…. A purple one with black-and-white stripes sits on Paramita’s hand, turning it into a flower. If the forest had been a Bengali household, we might have screamed in delight, “You’re getting married!” It’s one of those folk inheritances, accepted and passed on without testing: like the frog whose insistent croaking invokes the rain, so does a butterfly perched on a human signal an impending wedding.
“Sri Sri Prajapataye Namaha …” Hindu Bengali wedding cards begin with an invocation to prajapati—“butterfly,” but also the god Brahma, creator of the universe. Two lines, like an X, two arcs connecting its ends, and two feelers, the butterfly sits on every card as if they were flowers. Before the invitees’ names can be written, other marks must be made, reminders and remainders of a culture of nonliteracy. I remember sitting with my father, stamping every envelope with a turmeric and vermilion dot. Every detail implied something—not just what they “represented” but also the intimacy and affection of an invitation touched by hand.
It seems quite obvious to my mind, untrained as it was in the mantras, that everyone would be invited—the elements, plants, and animals, and, almost as an afterthought, even humans. The evening before my wedding, my aunts invite the river. They speak to it as they would a human, in daily spoken language, their tone colloquial: Our daughter is getting married, please come for the wedding…. Before coming to the river, they had, accompanied by a solitary drummer and a flautist, gone to a few houses in our neighborhood carrying a ghoti—“metal bell urn”—and collected water from the well in these seven houses, inviting their water for the wedding.
The invitations continued—not to water
