We should not mind so small a flower

In the blazing summer of April, as the bitumen melted on the black road and eyes were narrowed to escape the burning, a Laburnum dropped a seed pod on innocent me on her evening stroll the other day. It hurt. I looked up angrily and it greeted me with blooms of yellow gold that one would have otherwise missed. Later, as starlings swept the skies in murmuration, I saw little white bulbs of jasmine, opening up for the night even as the shoe flower had shut shop. Madhumalati for whom Tagore wrote a poem, Madhobi, The Young Spring Flower, was laden with redolent flowers that start off an anaemic white and blush to a deep red by day three to attract the bees for pollination.

It is the season of flowers, and spring has forced tulips out of earth from Keukenhof to Srinagar, prompting people to once more talk of how tulips in Europe are a gift of the Ottomans. The word tulip is a derivative from duleband, the cloth used for a turban. Tulips were theft worthy items in the 16th century, and as Whatsapp group of our apartment boils over with accusations of people stealing flowers for puja from the park and money plants being snapped, I chuckle that history just repeats itself.

I grew up on a steady supply of flowers at the annual Flower Show at Kochi, (then Cochin) back in the 80s. We are almost the same age, the flower show and I. In the tiny heart of a 7-year-old walking around rows of potted dahlias, whose flowers were as big as her face, the show fostered a life-long romance bordering on prayerful worship to flowers and anything floral. If food wasn’t served on plates with flowers printed on them, she had rather starve. It whetted her appetite for mugging up scientific names of plants and flowers, and with a mother equally fanatical about flowers, they trained lantana to climb on tree stumps, grafted rare colours of bougainvillea, and arranged Birds of Paradise in fluted vases across home.

Flower shows have a long history in the world, and voyages and explorations of the 18th century introduced continents to each other’s flora and fauna, leading to explosive developments in horticulture. It was at the behest of colonialism that many botanical gardens and societies sprang up in India. Most South Indians would know of the Government botanical gardens in Ooty that has been holding flower shows for more than a century now. When I was a resident of Bengaluru, I would take my daughter to the Lal Bagh glasshouse for the flower show that coincided with the Republic Day, where one posed against giant hearts of red roses for selfies. The garden city now has pink poi phenomenon where rows of Tabebuia bloom with synchronicity making a spectacular view like the sakuras in Japan. If Bengaluru has pink poi, Ladakh has apricot blooms that are pink too. Had it not been for the bright bougainvillae (not flower, but bracts), our highway drives would have been so much the more boring.

Our art and crafts thrive on flowers, with Kanchipuram sarees donning kamalam (lotus) butta or a thuthiripoo (indian mallow). Flowers have a special place in Mughal architecture. Take the Taj, that has flowers but in precious stones.

If flowers were not there, half of our literature would dry out. Wordsworth wouldn’t have daffodils to dream about or Kumaran Asan wouldn’t philosophise about the flower that has fallen (veena poovu is a classic in Malayalam literature). Tagore could never plead to God to pluck him like a little flower or Emily Dickinson write about why we should not mind a small flower.

Love, romantic one at that is symbolized by roses, and John Boyle O Reilly votes for cream-white rose bud with a flush on its petal lips for love that is purest and sweetest. Our heroes would be less romantic if Mohammed Rafi did not imagine the letter he wrote to the love of his life turning into a flower in the morning and star by the night (likhein jo khat tujhe oh tere yaad mein hazaaron rang ke nazaare ban gaye, savera jab hua tho phool ban gaye, jo raat aaye tho sitare ban gaye). Mighty Bhima proved his devotion to Draupadi through a flower-- the eternal kalyanasougandhika.

Brides carry bouquets, jaymaal is exchanged at wedding ceremonies and flowers are showered on newly-weds. Flowers accompany us to the grave even. At every stage in life, flowers walk with us.

And can we imagine celebrations without flowers? On the first day of Chaitra, Uttarakhand celebrates phool dei, also called Phool Sankranti with young girls placing flowers on every door step with chants of phool dei, chamma dei. Soon after it, I was at the church for Palm Sunday, offering flowers during the symbolic procession crying Oshana. Palm Sunday service is magic, juggling the palm leaf, making cross at its tip, and carrying it back with reverence-- it is a spring festival at its heart. It often reminds me of the phoolonwali holi played at the Banke Bihari temple in Vrindavan. On Basant Panchami day, Hazrat Nizammudin Auliya’s dargah at Delhi’s Nizamuddin celebrates with yellow flowers of mustard and marigold. Onam is incomplete without the pookalam and Vishukkani mandates the luxe blooms of konna (laburnum).

When life gets dreary and despair is fired in the air by warring countries, the simple sight of flowers fills us with hope. A decade ago, The Ecology of Flowers study by Harvard Medical School and Massachussets General Hospital confirmed that the sight of small arrangements of flowers significantly improves our mood in the mornings. The Bible promised that mankind is more precious to God and to look at the lilies in the field as proof. Not even Solomon in all his glory was as beautiful as them, and so by inferential logic, how much more should God care for his children.

Every tiny flower in the field testifies to the truth that nothing is insignificant in this world. Even as pop positivity has co-opted flowers, asking us to bloom where we are planted and not all trees flower at the same time, it is true that flowers bathe us in a light of spectacular beauty and truth. As for me, the deal was sealed long ago, when my grandfather explained to me that my name was Hebrew for lily. Shoshanna. I am a die hard flower-girl, who when in doubt, buys flowers.