A little gift

 

Safed aak (white madar or crown flower) is a shrub having lovely clusters of white flowers with lavender core. Officially named calotropis gigantean it’s a large shrub majorly found in climes on the drier side. According to Shiva Purana, Lord Shiva likes aak flowers, so the garland of aak flowers is offered to Shiva for peace, prosperity and social harmony. Further, its latex is used as arrow poison as well. The shrub has many medicinal uses also.

There is an aak shrub in front of our house. An old man sometimes arrives in front of our gate asking for flour. He is from a group of cattle herders from Rajasthan who roam around with their big herds of large-horned skinny cows. The cows belong to some rich landholder back in the home state. These are poor cattle keepers who work for the sahukar on a fixed salary, a paltry sum barely enough for two times bread and butter. They guide the herds through the increasingly thin spaces of wild growth and public pastures in the north Indian states.

This particular old man asks about the aak whenever he arrives on our doorstep. ‘I would take a sapling whenever I go back to my desh,’ he would say.

India is a land of myth, legends, faith and belief. Maybe the shrub holds some auspicious importance for their tribe back home. The old man has grace and gentility born of a positive acceptance of one’s old age.

This time when he came to ask for a little bowl of wheat flour, he told me that he will be going back to his desh on the occasion of Diwali and wants to take a sapling with him. I helped him in taking out a sapling by digging earth. It was a nice sight to see him walking slowly with his sapling and flour bag.

Let the world fight over big issues. He is happy with his aak sapling. It’s a kind of Diwali gift for his family in the desert state.

I pray that the sapling grows and blooms in front of his house. I imagine and feel ineffably soft whisper of ‘peace with life’ in his yard when the sapling blooms its first flower while the frivolous claimants of bigger greatness go hopping, skipping, grinding groaning, prancing and haranguing.

The somberly gleaming flame of the old man’s dream Diwali gift; the lewd blaze of hypocritical beings trying to assuage the sores on their soles born of endlessly bigger and bigger pursuits. It’s a world of extreme polarities after all.