India, June 15 -- One by one, creeping out of cosmic crevices, the stars appear out of nowhere to chandelier our night. Just as the meadows and moors of the mountains are all starred over by tiny flowers in a trice of spring's sun rays. Blood-deep corn poppies love churned up soil. These iconic flowers had sprung virtually overnight from the torn asunder battlefields of Europe in World Wars I and II. The instant poppies had inspired the in situ poem, 'In Flanders Field', and the Polish war song, 'Red Poppies on Monte Cassino'. I was in the foothills of Siswan, stealing in by twilight to watch fireflies by a minor check-dam. As the moon deepened ray by silver ray, one by one the jugnoos came to flicker on bushes as if an invisible hand had lit a thousand diyas out of nowhere. It left the eye bewildered because these insects were invisible during daylight in the same foliage. The pulsating stars of the jungle flew in a choreography of on-off flashes with male jugnoos bidding to attract females who returned the flashes, if allured. It was the love songs of jugnoos translated into flashes, a twinkling fireworks show in miniature, it was the night winking coyly, it was a shimmering and blinking jungle, it was embers drifting from an invisible jungle fire, it was stars who had come down to dance in silence. From the dam unfurled a stream, whose passage was no louder than a beehive's hum. The waters crystal, pure, and in the moonlight I could see slim, moss-green fishes darting and halting. A firefly glided over the water. Its reflection when cast upon the stream bed got refracted and enlarged. Below the flitting fishes, the reflection looked like a diaphanous white moth in flight. For just an interlude in eternity, the firefly had reincarnated into an ethereal spirit dwelling under ripples, a fair mermaid, a passing comet for the fishes. It was a tender night without an artificial light in sight. But disaster looms over the pristine foothills like a moon about to be permanently eclipsed. It is unchecked destruction by colonisers, palatial farmhouses and mining. One day, this stream will see its fish choking with plastics and kingfishers evicted by bobbing bottles of Kingfisher beer....