First thing every morning, you’ll see her freshly-bathed, fresh fragrant flowers in her hair, plucking yet more flowers to offer the gods during her puja.
Ever so often a little girl walking to school will spy a rare rose growing over the wall of someone’s garden, and quickly she will steal it to tuck into her plait.
My neighbour, Nirmala, is absolutely mad about flowers. She has bushes of the tiny, fragrant white zai and mogra, as well as the little scented orange flowers locally known as aboli. Her husband, a woodcutter, can often be seen patiently plucking each tiny flower so that his plump beautiful wife, a mother of five grown children, can decorate her hair.
Nirmala would be astonished to learn that in seventeenth century Amsterdam, tulips were such a craze that people abandoned jobs, businesses and wives to become tulip growers, that tulips cost thousands of guilders, that tulip bulbs became a currency, their value quoted like stocks and shares. But to cost so much they must have smelt really beautiful, isn’t it? - I can imagine her asking.
Though village women value flowers for their fragrance and beauty, they see them also in purely functional terms. This means flowers are grown essentially to either adorn themselves or to offer to the gods. The idea that a flower could be grown only for the sake of its beauty is deeply mysterious to them.
But then it’s funny how flowers mean so many different things to so many different people and cultures.
Vincent Van Gogh found a sunflower lying in a gutter in Paris and created one of his most famous paintings as a result. In A House of Pomegranates, Oscar Wilde writes a poignant tale of a romantic nightingale who, for the sake of love, sings all night long with the thorn of a white rose piercing her breast in order to draw out, drop by drop, every bit of her blood to stain the rose red. As the pop song goes: Roses are red, my love.
Flowers and their colours are deeply symbolic, and many are considered to have a special spiritual significance. They represent birth and the cycle of life, youth, beauty, love and what not. They are used as funeral wreaths, to festoon marriage beds, to garland politicians. Some flowers are said to ward off the evil eye, others are said to bring good luck. To the flower children of the sixties, they were symbols of the desire for peace.
Here in the village, flowers are as simple as the villagers themselves.
Will the cow eat them? – is an important consideration while deciding which flower to plant. Do they need to be watered regularly? – is another. As a result you rarely find exotic flowers here. Mostly, they’re the ones that grow easily from cuttings, from the stalks that are trimmed and discarded during the monsoon. The traditional red and white hibiscus, yellow oleanders, bougainvillea, some sacred flowers used only in pujas, and the many fragrant flowers for the hair.
Buying flowers for someone you love is now a cliché. Not buying them can sometimes be more memorable, as in this poem by Wendy Cope:
Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong.
The shop was closed. Or you had doubts –
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly.
You thought I might not want your flowers.
It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.
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