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Roses and thorns
Ranjita Biswas
Sitting down to write the column on the Valentine’s Day, and being located in the great democracy of India, the obvious topic perhaps should have been the consignments of pink chaddis to Pramod Muthalik, leader of Sri Rama Sene who thinks this day’s celebration as culturally polluting. Or about our knights-in-armour Parashuram Sena, a social work organisation in Jaipur who promises to ‘protect’ the lovers if they are harassed by the so-called protectors of Indian culture. Frankly, the whole issue seems depressing, actually a non-issue that hogs media attention for its sheer mindlessness. During the past week, bizarre though it would seem, I have been wondering, if my daughter and son travelled in a bus together in Mangalore, would they be targetted just because they are from opposite sexes and without visible signs of a ’married couple’? Or, whether a young couple holding hands because she is afraid of a storm would be seen as an ‘obscene’ gesture? I have concluded that Shakespeare would be very unwelcome in the milieu of Ram Senas because wasn’t he under the impression that “All the world loves the lovers?” Obviously, lots of people in the land of Kalidasa and legendary love-stories from epics to folklores do not think so in the modern IT-savvy India.
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There I go again, despite my resolution not to talk about Muthalik and company.
I stand corrected. Actually, I wanted to talk about roses, in red and pink, that flooded our garden and the parks in the hill station I grew up in. Shillong is always pretty, but more so in the spring. There the young Khasis mixed without finger-pointing, they sang together while strumming guitars; our college mates skipped class in our Catholic nun–run college with impunity when there was a football match by local clubs in the Polo Ground and we envied them a bit too. We, the girls from families from the ‘valley’, though not that ‘free’ did not know that we enjoyed much more freedom than counterparts in the big cities because of the ambience. Now you talk about it, and people say oh, the Khasis are matrilineal people. As if giving women more power in the social hierarchy was, well, not so “Indian’ or they were culturally ‘different.’ Give me that kind of leeway any day than rather than the humiliation of having to be on guard while commuting in the capital of the country. And now the poison spreading to other metros.
But when I think of red roses I remember the mali picking up the best ones from his own garden when I did well in the exam; of a bouquet that arrived from some anonymous admirer when I was stepping into adulthood. Was there something wrong in it? I never had occasion to worry, neither when my son borrowed my credit card, as a student he didn’t have one, to send a dozen of red roses to his girlfriend in another city on her birthday.
I think of pink roses remembering how I went to visit my sister, a new mother, in the nursing home, with a big bouquet to congratulate her. I think of pink as my daughter’s favourite colour; I present her a bouquet of pink roses every birthday. And I think of pink and red roses, masses of them in a house, when our neighbours, a great couple, were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary. Their daughter studying architecture in Delhi brought them all the way, half-opened, from Delhi to Guwahati as she flew down to celebrate. The house looked so beautiful and the pink and red candles added to the glow.
Roses, I never thought, despite their thorns, would depict something sinister, something obscene or un-Indian to exchange, the V-Day is only an excuse. We friends chanted “A rose, is a rose, is a rose” while walking through the Lady Hyderi Park in Shillong on way home from college. We learnt all the names of the varieties radiant in the annual rose shows.
Why should flowers, songs, expressions of love become such symbols of cultural deviation today? Have we lost our heart? I shudder at the thought of what memories of roses and yes, as symbols of love-expression in any form, will the younger ones take along if this utterly despicable people proliferate like raktabeej, monsters that rise from every drop of blood the demon sheds.
See, I couldn’t help talking about them! |
