The Florist

Lata’s soft touch wakes me up in the morning, like all the mornings following our marriage ten years ago. The roughness of her fingertips and the gradual change to her soft palms provides character to her hand. The roughness is born in the daily chores of the household. The softness is carried by love.

It is love that wakes her up before me each morning: love for the birdsong at dawn; for the air breathing through our windows, cool before giving birth to an unbearable, warm one; for the calm that fills each quiet morning. I tease her sometimes, telling her how she would rather live alone, without me. She replies laughing, indicating that I’m not one to argue. The calm my nature is so attached to was the reason for her marrying me.

The scent of rajnigandha blossoms greets me as I grasp her hand and pull myself up from our bed. As I turn their scent over in my mind, a voice inside my head repeats, Rajnigandha. White. I have made a habit of repeating the names of the colours of the flowers I know, each time I sense them. That is the best way to retain them in memory.

After chanting our morning prayers and sharing a cup of hot chai together, Lata and I busy ourselves with the tasks of the morning. Our home slowly welcomes the fragrance of mint and cumin. Mint and cumin—the scent of the morning. It brings to my mind memories of a shared breakfast, of cool lassi comforting my tongue, of the feeling of soft, ghee-laden paranthas on my fingertips. I try not to associate the morning with the worries of getting to work. After all, isn’t my work about the beauty one could sense in the world?

I grab my walking stick, some coins and a bundle of 10-rupee notes. Lata grabs her dupatta and the keys to our house. I hear Lata insert the key into the lock and listen to it turning.

Gripping my stick tightly, I start walking. My walking stick is, perhaps, the object I am most attached to. It foretells puddles, careless people, open potholes and stray dogs. What it can’t foretell is how business would fare that day.

I was introduced to the trade as a child. On some mornings I would tag along with Appa to where he sold flowers on the side of the road. The explosion of scents would make me curious. “Appa,” I used to sing to my father after exploring a flower with my little hands, “which flower is this?”. He then proceeded to tell me all he knew about that particular flower. “This one is the gulab, or the rose. The one you’re touching is red, but we also have white roses. And yellow ones too. They’re the most popular so we always need to ensure that we have enough, particularly during festivals.” I used to smell each flower, and Appa would ask me what I felt about the scents. Did it smell fresh, or rotten? Like a cool, wintery morning, or a colourful summer garden? I had a knack for differentiating and remembering those smells—lilies, hibiscuses, little lotuses, heliconias, and a number of other flowers that are Delhi’s favourites.

With a garland of marigolds around my neck, I used to act like a saint. “My blessings are with you and your flowers,” Appa would have to listen often. With a fatherly laugh he would follow with his words, “I don’t need blessings from any other saint now that I have yours! Treat that garland with care. We sell a lot of those each Tuesday, heave them in a cart to the temple where people buy one for Hanuman.” I remember when I learnt how to form a garland out of loose marigolds. My hands felt like craftsmen, identifying the center of their stalk and pushing a thread through it. Slowly I could attach the sharp, piercing thread to the cold metal needle by myself. This became a daily ritual. In a few months, I started crafting new designs, feeling the positions of flowers with my hands. I judged their placement based on the way the flowers would pull on my various fingers differently, depending on their weight.

The most beautiful garlands I fashioned, however, were for my mother’s picture, hung on the wall beside the pictures of Lakshmi and Krishna and other gods. Amma passed away when I was five. I don’t remember a lot about her except her soft and round face, the comfort of her arms, and the fragrance of sandalwood that adorned her. Each night she used to sing me to sleep with bhajans or devotional songs. Even after her demise, her good friend from childhood kept visiting to ensure that me and Appa fared well. Our families agreed that when I grew up, my marriage would be arranged with her daughter. And that is how I met Lata.

I clasp Lata’s hand tightly as she walks me to that same place on the side of the road where Appa used to announce his special flowers of the day. The pavement has become more crowded in these few decades. Other florists have set up camp, contributing to a busy and flourishing flower market in an obscure corner of West Delhi. We share an unusual bond of friendship. Despite the day-to-day competition, we understand each other well. If one of us doesn’t have the kind of flower a customer wants, we refer that customer to another one of us who has that flower in stock. That is what I do today when a customer expresses that they want something I cannot give them.

“Bhaiya, don’t you have the plastic flowers, the ones that last long?”, asks a woman who wants to buy some fake roses for an event at her office. “All these real roses, they wither so soon without water. And you know how letting water stand in a vase brings all the mosquitoes.” I do not know how to respond. Fake flowers are my weakness—the only way I am able to differentiate between various flowers is the shape. I tried selling them once by remembering the positions where different colours of the same flower were kept. However, people would move them around while looking at them and choosing. Eventually, I had to decide not to sell plastic flowers unless I hired a helper.

The same synthetic perfume is sprinkled on all those fake flowers. Why would people want to buy a flower without its characteristic scent? To people, what makes a flower is how it looks—its colour, the shape of its petals. A longing builds up inside me as I think of the many traits they overlook. The scent, the texture of the petals and the stems as you touch them, the sound you hear when you run your finger across their frames—those were the only features I could see.