Happy Nursery School

It seems like long ago, probably another life, when mother used to dress her up in red and white checks, white socks and black shoes. On a rain-washed day such as today, father would take her by the hand, with an umbrella colourfully filtering dull grey light. Sometimes when there was a puddle, she would ride in father’s arms, blabbering about school. Finally, on reaching the gates of the small building that was school, she would be excited by the sight of red and white checks running around in the garden and a few bawling their heads off while detaching from their mothers. 

She would smartly bid goodbye and run to her class. Morning assembly would be cancelled today. The wet, slushy grounds were unfit for forty impatient feet. Filling in colour in an apple or turning to a new page of handwriting was exciting. 

Especially when rain is beating an unsteady rhythm outside.

The lunch break brought the smell of boiled eggs, now dewy and stinky with being stuffed into the boxes while still warm. Handkerchiefs. Meant to be dirty. An occasional neighbour would extend a piece of apple or guava as a token of friendship. But some things were to be guarded like dragons guarding castles. Water-bottles, fruity erasers, and tall new pencils. Broken crayons, pencil shavings and torn pages could be traded for friendship. Like apples or guavas.

In winters she would often return, too excited to keep still, with a bright red button tightly enclosed in her fist. It was not from her sweater. Hers were black. She had found it. And she pleaded mother to sew on the bright thing right next to her boring buttons. 

She would have a glowing coal for a heart.

Lantana Camara

As the train shudders into the Ashtown station, there is a typical smell that greets her. A kind of wild flower. Once heard, these had been planted by one ancient Spanish missionary who had brought it from his motherland. She wonders how this place would have looked then… Was the soil still brown. Or had it already turned black?

Her place had a special feel about it during those five days of the month when the entire town gathers in the circular park to celebrate the ‘festival of joy’. What a misnomer, she smiles to herself. In the mornings, the sun shines too bright. The air of ashtown is perpetually heavy with blackness. The sun brings sweat. The blackness sticks. And the sun adds further tan to the already dark faces. The outcome- bright clothes with sooty faces. Hesitant smiles. Eavesdropping ears. And egg-white eyes, flitting, searching, cursing.

The skies are too blue. Flowers are in excess. The sultry heat smothers their delicate smell. What remains is only the stench. The park breeds evil, like distended belly of the street urchin breeds worms. Divinity is restricted to a semicircle of radius five meters. White chalk marks, designs, flowers, fruits, colorful festoons, glittering clothes, ornaments – all within the semi circle. Outside that is a Victorian world. Full of snooty people dressed as clowns. Pasted smiles and colored noses. A whisper here, a hug there. A grand opera of disguised insecurities.

She hates this season. These five days. For her, they bring the worst out of people.

She wishes if she could fold those five and five hands of the mute deity, like a pair of Chinese fans, and pull her by the now two hands and take her right hand and watch her smile as she ran with her into fields flooded with tall bushes of wild flowers and sit by a river and listen to her tales and breathe in soft, light, fragrant air.

Lantana keeps vileness at bay.

The Fragrance of Night....

New books and their smell,
Old flowers and their scent....

            Among hindu bengalis there is a custom of using special flowers for specific occasions. The marigold is used during Saraswati puja, the hibiscus for Kali puja and the sweet 'shiuli' is used during Durga puja. Apart from pujas, the other significant occasions such as marriages, birthdays and others are also assigned specific fragrant flowers.
           Among these flowers, there is one in particular which creates a real disturbance in the senses of a seasoned bengali. It is the 'rajanigandha'. The name literally translates as 'fragrance of the night'. It is typically and abundantly used in marriages. From flower sticks to garlands, a bengali marriage house would bear it's scent in the air for days together.
           Having said this, it would not seem fitting to describe this beautiful, pristine white flower as 'disturbing'. But its potential to meddle with the senses in a decidedly uncomfortable manner comes with a second dimension, it's other function. The rajanigandha is again typically and amply used in hindu funerals.
           To have a flower play such ghastly and horribly opposite roles is sadly comic. Walking into a post-funeral yagna, one may encounter garlands, rajanigandha sticks, just as before but having totally different connotations.
            And it  is this very criteria that makes this flower and its scent a bitter-sweet assault on the senses of every traditionally bred bengali. It makes the flower dramatically alive. In anniversaries, when rajanigandha sticks are brought home by relatives and friends, it brings with it the warmth of love and a promise of nocturnal magic.
But later, much later, when the revelry is done, and friends have left, the rajanigandha sticks standing in a water filled vase on a lonely table in the dark living room diffuses its sad spell all over the house. And while lying in bed eyes fill with tears and hearts grow afraid in anticipation of the doom that the scent spells.

         It makes one nervous to think how a simple flower and its perfume can hold such promise of exuberance while hiding  a lethal gloom behind it....