Helen Mathur, Beeston u3a
East Midlands Region
Enlightenment
‘I need your help on Saturday night. We will be away when my Queen of the Night blooms.’
That’s how the phone conversation started. Sheila wasn’t confused for long. It soon became clear that Ruby needed a plant sitter to mind the time-lapse camera that was set up to record the flowering of a plant that bloomed only once a year, and that, too, for a single night. Sheila didn’t hesitate.
Even when she found herself travelling alone on a local train deluged with monsoon rain, she didn’t regret agreeing to spend the night awake in a suburban balcony open to the humid air and the inevitable mosquitos. Perhaps, having been brought up in the undemanding Midlands of England, she was naive about the potential dangers that Mumbai lined up for the wary and the unwary visitor. She was excited by the prospect of doing something, even travelling on the infamous local trains, on her own. At the same time, she was annoyed that Neil had not turned up at the station in time for the train. He would, no doubt, show up at Ruby’s apartment later in the evening. She hoped he wouldn’t miss the opening of the bud: scheduled for ten, according to Ruby.
Sheila was on a gap year after university, tagging along on an ‘Asian Adventure’ with the boyfriend she had tagged along with for most of the last three years. Somehow, the places she wanted to go, and the sights she wanted to see, hardly seemed to match with Neil’s itinerary. And who was she to know where the best places were, when he was the one with Indian roots? The fact that these roots were a couple of generations in the past, and that Sheila was more widely read in matters Oriental, didn’t stop Neil running the show.
The two of them had been only one month into the trip when they had landed in Mumbai, welcomed by Ruby and Rahul, distant cousins of Neil’s mother. The older pair had shown the younger around and had welcomed them into their home for a week before Neil decided he needed to move to a distinctly seedy hotel in the trendier South of the city. With rather more reluctance than she had shown before, Sheila, had, once again, tagged along. But she had left her heavy bag with Ruby, and decamped with a small haversack.
Saturday evening saw her dripping wet, and rather bruised from struggling to push through the resisting throng of bodies to get off the train at the Santa Cruz stop. Proud of herself for fearlessly taking an auto rickshaw like a seasoned resident, Sheila arrived at the sea-facing apartment block. She picked up the keys from the watchman, took the lift to the fourth floor and let herself in. It was already nine.
Switching on the lights in the hallway and kitchen, she discovered a detailed list of instructions, along with water bottles and snack boxes, and a tube of mosquito repellent cream. The living room light she left off, as Ruby had requested, so that bright light didn’t disturb the balcony where the plant was flourishing along with a mass of other tropical plants.
By nine thirty Sheila was sitting cross legged on a low wooden stool staring, not at the huge pale bud onto which the camera lens was trained, but at her mobile phone. You know what it’s like to keep checking for messages that never come. You don’t know whether to be irritated with the person not sending, or with yourself for caring. Sheila was not quite in that position yet. She was more worried than irritated. He had agreed to come with her, after all. And people who have made arrangements don’t usually drop them without explanation. Or do they?
As she went over the conversation with Neil, she recalled his first words about the expedition, ‘Can’t you go on your own?’
She hadn’t expected that. But then it was the first time in years that he wasn’t the one directing the action. She remembered the time she had suggested going to the ballet. He had told her that she should find a girlfriend to go with. That was different, wasn’t it? And he did backtrack about plant-sitting when she pointed out that it was only right to help Ruby out when she and Rahul had been so helpful to them. So where was Neil? The South Mumbai roads were badly flooded: he might be stuck in a taxi drowning in swirling muddy water. Then again, he might not. His phone was not off. He was receiving her WhatsApp messages and even, according to the little blue ticks that showed on the screen, reading them. He was just not replying.
At five minutes to ten, she put the phone aside and checked the camera position. The bud had moved. She could see quite clearly: a low light with some sort of filter illuminated the plant but left the rest of the balcony in as near total darkness as you can get in a city housing millions of people. It was also as quiet as you can get. Quiet enough to hear the roar of the Arabian Sea, made violent by the monsoon — a quiet disturbed by the hum of air conditioners in neighbouring flats and by the incessant noise of insects and frogs.
At ten thirty she took a photo with her cell phone and sent it to Neil. She looked at the image and back at the plant. It looked alien. She wondered what he would think. Foolish, really, as plants were unlikely to figure at all in his thinking. Come to think of it, he’d never remarked on all the lovely trees and flowers that she had pointed out: Bougainvillea, Hibiscus, Jacaranda, and other beauties with magical names.
She could now see that the position of the tentacle-like structures that surrounded the bud had moved. She would study the botanical information later and find out what the different bits were called, but now, as the tip of the bud started to show signs of a tiny gap opening up, her focus was on observing and photographing, not naming.
Ruby, in that long initial phone call, had told Sheila that another name for the flower was Brahma kamal…the lotus of Brahma, the supreme Hindu deity. A plant that flowered so rarely, and with a flower that lasted just a few hours, might, Sheila thought, inspire awe. Sheila had taken a look at Wikipedia to find out about this numinous plant and was duly impressed. But she was also confused. There were many species that were commonly referred to as The Queen of the Night — which one was she looking at now?
By eleven the flower was half open. The numerous petals and tepals were white, thin, and pointed: it was going to look truly stunning, like a dazzling star. It reminded her of a drawing of an exotic, stylised lotus on an oriental vase in a museum. And that fragrance! Surely all the moths for miles around must be heading this way.
At midnight Sheila photographed the fully opened flower. What beauty. But how fragile. Tears welled up.
There was little more to do now. Her emotions settled. She didn’t even feel tired. But she slipped into a trance like state, fixated on the bloom, like someone meditating in front of a candle flame. She no longer heard the background noise, no longer noticed her surroundings. Even her thoughts ceased.
By six in the morning, in the light of the early dawn, the flower began to wither. Sheila was fully awake. She stretched and yawned. Leaving the balcony for the kitchen to make some morning tea, she felt different.
After a quick shower and a bite to eat, she switched on her tablet and booked herself a flight home. She messaged Neil a final time, telling him that if he wanted to see her off, he should come to Santa Cruz on Tuesday. She wouldn’t answer his texts if he sent any. She had been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking why he hadn’t turned up at the station, she should have been asking why she herself was not showing up in her own life.
Would she credit the Brahma kamal with opening her eyes? Well, she couldn’t, could she?
Ruby’s flower wasn’t the holy flower. Shame really. Someone had sold Ruby the plant under false pretences. It was a night-flowering cactus with flowers of great beauty, splendid size and with the same short existence. But the Brahma kamal was a different genus entirely.