February's Flowers, In March

One day in 1994, when I was maybe four or five years old, I picked every flower in our home garden and sold it to whoever would buy them in our neighbourhood, for whatever price they were willing to pay.

They were an assortment - gladiolus, geraniums, hibiscus, roses and marigolds. My father worked at a pesticide company then, which meant seeds and floral supplies found their way home as a quiet perk of the job.

My grandmother and our help, Bahadur, collaborated on a laissez faire gardening project. They scattered the seeds in the mud and left the rest to fate. The flowers, unburdened by expectations, flourished.

Then, like something out of a fable, my maternal aunt Raji gifted my mom a set of cane baskets - the kind that were straight out of the Readers' Digest edition of The World's Best Fairy Tales. They looked like they were destined to carry cake, flowers, that type of goodness. So I gathered all the flowers, placed them carefully in the baskets and set out to sell them.

Some people gave me ten paise, others a rupee. There wasn't a sophisticated economics to it. The margins were loose and the markets were unregulated. At its heart, this was a bohemian enterprise.

That evening, my father came home and learnt of the day’s events.

He was mildly horrified.

That I’d asked other people for money was the issue. He didn’t even change out of his work clothes before we went on an apology- and-reimbursement-tour across the neighborhood.

I returned the grand total of eight rupees I’d made from my efforts, and we didn’t even get to take the flowers back. I suppose we were employee minded people. Asking for money felt vaguely dishonorable.

But this post is about flowers. And spring. And all the exquisite, ineffable things that flowers carry inside them - lightness and contentment and a gentle beauty.

In my mother’s apartment complex in Bangalore, the landscapers have done a damn good job of telling flowers exactly where to grow. The flowers don't seem to mind. They, too, are employee minded.

Earlier this week, we took a walk around the complex, taking inventory of all the types of flowers around us.

They are everywhere. Orange marigolds by the car park. Intricately patterned Ixoras in red, white and yellow along the fences. Fuschia pink and sunlight-yellow moss roses in the children’s park. Peacock flowers and bougainvillea lining the passageways. And then entire trees swallowed whole by purple jacarandas and yellow trumpet flowers.

A few weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day, I bought K some mauve pink roses from the flower stall at Defence Colony Market. We’d just wrapped up a work meeting, and since we were already there, I picked up some white lilies for S too.

S was convinced that we’d dimension jumped - said I’d done this before, years ago, after another work thing, on another Valentine’s Day, at this exact stall. A moment was looping back on itself.

And I was listening, half there, half drifting somewhere else. Thinking, in that lazy, background way, about the things that have changed and the things that never do.

Mostly, it’s a quiet kind of victory — a relief - to experience these flowers, and love as a type of planetary force rather than an all consuming limerence.

It is spring. And I get the sense that flowers are the point.