Rose 108 has trouble opening up. She is shunned by her family for being frigid, as she refuses to unfurl despite being woken up recently by some of the brightest days of the year. Being the palest bud of the bush, while also being the only bud in the bush, makes her life very difficult.
She would take a peek at the iridescent sun and hear his weightless knocks on her kitchen window, using one petal and one of her sepals to shield her sensitive face. Even this tiniest of motions would be too much for the shy bud. Using her sepal as a tightly woven veil around her teardrop-shaped head, she would instantly retract back into her soft cocoon. Squeezing herself inwards into what could only be described as a foetal position for the rose, she would watch her cousins playing with one another, holding on tightly to her inner sadness. She feels left out every time her plumply exuberant cousin imitates the dance of a giant bumblebee who has been calling frequently in the rising summer heat.
One day, one rose cousin decides to humiliate this “runt” of a flower child. She leans over to her neighbouring plant and lowers one of her leaves towards its growing shoots. She lets out a series of whistles audible only to small insects. A light green patch on one of the plant leaves starts shaking. To the plant’s astonishment, tens of hairy aphids emerge from the light green pigmentation, scattering in every direction of the compass imaginable.
A number of the panicking and visibly distressed round aphids climbed onto the rose cousin’s extended leaf. Moving with lightning speed, the cousin rose straightens herself back up and pushes her way through the bush to find Rose 108. To the darling bud’s horror, her cousin flicks her leaf towards her, releasing a horde of formerly confused but now excited aphids onto the bud’s section of the bush.
They furiously begin stationing themselves like horrid, stinking brooches, around the bud’s head and sepals. “Are you going to open up now, weirdo? Hahahaa!” The rose cousin laughs at the poor bud’s plight. Rose 108 shuts further into herself, growing even a paler tint than usual. Some of the aphids begin gliding over one another to look for more comfortable positions to recline, on the bud’s surface. Others prepare to sharpen their proboscides so they could relentlessly puncture the bud’s soft, tearable, yet tightly furled petals.
On the darkest night of the year, moonlight ceases to dawn upon Earth. Just a few hours into midnight, the human owner tending to the rose bush appears in the kitchen. While examining her chunky Ficus Reticus bonsai, she notices the plant’s tiny finger-like roots jutting out unusually. They seem to be pointing towards the right side of the rose bush. When the human noticed this, she instinctively started checking the flowers and she saw poor Rose 108 in the midst of becoming the centrepiece of an aphid grand feast.
Horrified, she drags the bud under running water at the adjacent sink. It took four washes, with human finger scrubs, to flush out the now terrified aphids. They float in a mini whirlpool around the sinkhole before becoming sucked into the dark pipe network, one bug after another.
Perhaps it was the rigorous shower. Perhaps it was the rose cousin’s cruelty. Every 30 minutes, the rose bud began heaving sighs of relief, so much so that one by one, her wound up petals began contracting to unbearable tightness, before relaxing. This repeated a few times saw the bud very slowly but surely opening up.
Ten minutes to midnight, Rose 108 towers over her counterparts, now a complete blossom with her diameter surpassing all other roses in the bush. She is the pinkest of shades, and with petals so luscious and healthy, they put the plumpest rose to shame. Her perfume has been released, but in the darkness of the night, no bees or pollinators are in sight to enjoy this olfactory pleasure bomb.
But Rose 108 didn’t open up for pollinators that night. While many of her already bloomed cousins struggled to remain upright or awake due to the exhaustion that the act of night respiration causes, this former bud now stands tall. She felt that a divine hand was at play to orchestrate her surprising debut. She looks eagerly at the lightless night sky, hopeful to see a spark from heavens she could thank. She waits, her face now glued to the windows. She saw nothing but stillness. She saw nothing but nothing, not even a flash of lightning or even the street lamp from across the road. That night, it was incidentally broken by some drunk vandals.
Midnight strikes. A sight in the sky only visible to Rose 108 begins appearing, in a brilliantly bright globular form, as bright as the sun, but it illuminates only the observer, like the screen of an impossibly dark cinema theatre. A flash of a resolutely bluish toddler’s face emerges, with cheeks so round and hair so curly they exhibited anti-gravity, acrobatic stunts every time the child moved. The child, blue, smiling, rotund, extends a chubby finger out from the darkest sky he resided in. Rose 108 continues to stare at this spectacle, her petals in full bloom and her mouth now agape with inexplicable wonder at this mysterious moonlike presence. He is in full view, only to her.
This post is an ode to Krishna, Hinduism’s beloved blue God, who is often portrayed as a butter-loving baby child. This was written just an hour or so after his midnight birthday today which is celebrated with plenty of music, dance, sweets and toddlers donning adorable costumes across the world.
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