I’ve been bringing back flowers—dried, dead, fallen, plucked prematurely, tread-on with sports shoes and bare feet and by the monkey-on-the-bicycle, slightly wilted overnight—to the apartment and stacking them in a glass tumbler ceremoniously for the past two weeks. A less than disingenuous archaeologist (or a flowers-in-jars version of a taphonomist) would be able to chart mood swings with a casual sideways glance at the now almost-full tumbler. (Note to self: scan before the contents of said jar hit the waste bin.)

The habit cemented itself in place during the Diwali week when there was no one else in the rooms (or outside of the rooms, I think) and the flowers helped fill the empty flat with other dead things. The setup: a prodigious loneliness post a botched morning run (because the air is too chilly in an unexpected, sneaky way air can be—somewhat perverse for Vijayawada—in November and because I under-slept after a regular late-blooming allnighter); the sun in neat geometric patterns across the quilted lawn; abandoned patches of termite-churned earth; almost-dandelions, dry and anticipating a wind kind enough to put an end to their lo(u)nging, etc.

Then on the seventh day, I enter the room flower-laden and exhausted and sweating through layers of running shorts, and the lady[1] is all smiles and eyeing the tumbler. She’s decided it will be nicer to have some out-of-the syllabus flowers in there. (The housing society has an efficient, predictable flowering plant pattern in place. Take the same route everyday and you end up with the same dead plant parts in nearly the same stages of decay filling your table-top glass tumblers. It is no fun. Not when you realise the effort-v/s-effect imbalance is skewed obviously towards the former.) She’s decided it is time for a change from the timetable-esque tableau in the tumbler. A small, kind act of adventure perhaps. She’s decided on a hibiscus in light orange turning a deep crimson towards the inside, and a light pink one I can’t hang a name onto, with a stamen that resembles a regular wick (not John-) deep in the middle of the whorl. She says the Chembarathi (H-biscuit, Hibiscus) is a Mandaaram. I nod a satisfied/surprised/acknowledging nod and don’t betray my small-ish internal outrage. Then I realise an orange Chembarathi is as “Chem-” (red) as a non-white Mandaaram that is indistinguishable in terms of all etymological minutiae from an orange Chembarathi.[2]

I’m outraged at my internal outrage now.

1: She is from Namburu, “that side.” She helps clean the utensils and the bed-sheets and the room and makes a mean dal curry given the chance. We are past the ‘have you seen the pickle-jar’ phase, without having been through the ‘mynameiskeyaar-whatisyourname’ phase; so it is somewhat weird to be around when she is. The scene is domestic but it is a furniture-showroom-with-ordinary-lighting type of situation.

2: Later (three days later, today) post a long-ish (short) conversation with Miss. S on the appropriated names of flowers I realise this would mean a wildly different kind of nostalgia out of context. Maybe not in the original greyscale so much. Yet.