Category: Writing

A flower sprouts and blossoms. The sunshine radiates energy into it. Once the flower’s petals, a dark lipstick red, blossom out as far as they can, a bumble bee with yellow and black stripes lands on one of the petals. It creeps inside the fragile shell casing of the petals in slow movements and starts pollinating the flower. The whole process is like sex. After it’s finished pollinating the flower, the bee buzzes away. For a while the sky is blue and the sun shines but over a course of some time, dark dense grey clouds come from the east and cover up the sun. A mountain overlooks the field upon which this and many other flowers sprout. Thus, slowly the rain clouds build. Thunder shakes the ground. Lightning strikes in the distance at the edge of the horizon, where the land meets the sea. And then, everything becomes calm. Calm. A soft flutter of wind breezes the flower. Its petals shake, like armor plating. They unhinge. Loosen up. The green stem of the flower bends as the wind gets stronger and the sky gets darker. And in the sea of flowers, all of them are silent. All of them wait.
A droplet of rain hits a petal of the flower. The drop of water seeps in between the petals and goes into the flower. More droplets fall from the dense sky and soon all the petals on the flower are soaked, the rain water bleeding a darker hue of red, making some petals opaque, filling their veins, bursting their organs, making them droopy. Some flowers in the field of flowers will be smitten down by the rain, stamped to the ground and into the soil. Some flowers may even be severed from their roots, chopped in half at the stem. All of them will let loose some of their petals, even the ones that survive the onslaught; there will be an incredible blowing of petals and pollen in the direction of the wind, and for a while at a certain time and place on a certain position on the face of the earth, there will be nothing but the site of petals moving across the wind like locusts in the desert. A mass of red across the plain.
Our precious flower did not survive this onslaught. Instead, the pollen became a passenger to the wind and traveled across to the other side of the mountain. And by a river, around some trees, perhaps beside a bush, another flower of red petals will bloom.

By Ashish Seth