प. ~ माहि वे

धूप  पानी पे बरस जाए 

ये साये बनाये। ..मिटाये 

मैं कहूँ , और तू आ जाए, बेहलाये 

हर दूरी शर्माए 

तू साथ हैं हो  दिन राते हैं ......

~ maahi ve,  lyrics by Irshad Kamil.

I have a fascination with Bougainvillea - they enthrall me. The only other flower/plant that does that to me is the Frangipani tree. I love it equally - maybe I love a bougainvillea more. It's bougainvillea season in Singapore right now. I was on the way to the airport last week and for miles and miles and miles the boulevard was lined with these gorgeous bright little flowers - they were even hanging off the over-bridges. After a couple of crazy days at work and in life personally, it was like watching magic unfold - almost like a new lease of life, which my trip to India cemented further. I connected with some very close friends and realised that distances truly don't matter that much and we promised each other that when we are in doubt of whether to call or not - we will pick up the phone and call. 

Coming back to the flowers - there's something about beautiful shades of pink, orange and red against white walls or any walls for that matter, under a brilliant blue sky - that in itself can settle your worries and lend some peace and quiet to our otherwise busy minds. When I traveled with a couple of friends to Lombok long back, we stayed at this villa where my two most favorite plants came together to create the beauty that is the picture above.

One day a couple of months back, I decided if i loved it that much, i should get a plant home and after putting it off for many weekends, I finally got one baby home.  I clicked a picture and sent it to my mother, who is an avid gardener, so proud I was of my new born (kind of?), I even named her प.

And then the week after i got her, she completely withered and died - not even one leaf at a time, all together all at once, she was there one day and the next day all i saw were bare branches and nothing at all. I remember coming home from work one evening and seeing those empty branches in a sad pot and just spending the next five minutes standing and staring at the lack of a plant. I teared up because I had so wanted her to bloom and flourish with joy that this sudden loss caught me unawares and I felt empty & weirdly hollow. While I nurtured her, i knew that with her beauty one day she would nurture me. So I watered her just enough, kept her out in the sunlight as one should for a bougainvillea, spoke to her in the evenings (yes I'm crazy like that ) and then she just died. 

I called my mom and my voice quivered on the phone - and so did my mom's. I did my best to control my other emotions riding on the back of this particular one and pushed them all back - and had a sane conversation with ma about what to do - had she really died, what had I done wrong? And she told me to not water it anymore, keep it out in the sunlight and just wait, for a bougainvillea was a sturdy creature and she always sprang back to life unexpectedly. And that she does tend to be dramatic and completely sheds herself of all that makes her beautiful and be naked for a while before resurrecting. Hence, i should just wait. I trust my mother on all matters of life - i hate to admit it, but even when she is wrong, she is kind of right - i usually start off not trusting her advice at all and then boom - life shows me otherwise and she emerges victorious and she never forgets to say "I told you so."  Every single time.  So, keeping with tradition, I did not trust her this time around as well. After i hung up, I sat down on my couch and weeped terribly for the plant I had lost - there were many other things paining me, so maybe the loss my dearest plant triggered a barrage of emotions I had kept walled inside of me. 

I kept the flower pot as it is, secretly hoping that my mother is proven right yet again. Watered her intermittently and placed her in the sunniest spot while my other plants got a little less of it. Slowly she started coming back - there was a leaf here and there, tender little things - i almost wanted to hug them. I crossed my fingers and hoped for a miracle.

To watch the bougainvillea lining everything on the path to the airport last week felt like a rebirth for me, especially after my recent loss(es). I am a huge believer of signs - and I took that as a sign of "things will be fine, they are not fine right now but they will be soon". 

I got back home to Singapore and the airport bougainvilleas greeted me again. But what was spectacular was this sight that was waiting for me at my mini garden:

My baby was glowing again. These flowers did not exist a week ago and now they did. Again i almost wanted to hug them tight and give them a kiss each. I sent my mother a picture and she too felt the same joy i did, and said to me "OMG beautiful, see it came back to life and is flowering" and when i read that on Whatsapp, I felt a weird twinge in my heart and all I wanted was to be next to her, to be her child again. That's when I decided I needed to write about this whole experience.

In yoga, we often speak about how so many of the yoga asanas are inspired by nature - which is true for a lot of creative art forms as well. I was at this South Asian Music Festival last weekend and a very renowned kathak dancer Pandit Birju Maharaj danced for us and he spoke about how nature inspired many of his compositions - he had a few kathak moves which resembled horses, ducks and peacocks (the closest YouTube video I can find is this). There was a Rabindra Sangeet musician Rezwana Choudhury and she spoke about how Tagore wrote many of his songs inspired by nature as well and used nature as a backdrop to express human emotions. 

When I read that message from my mother, all these three things came back to me and i decided to take inspiration from nature and write, and maybe slwoly live again. A very close friend of mine is going through a heartbreak and it is painful to watch her suffer, but I also know that there are some parts of that journey she will have to walk alone. I can not, however much I try, pick up her and have her avoid crossing those paths or not go through that pain. But I also know that she will revive from it all - exactly like my bougainvillea did. Because what are we, if not extensions of all that exists around us?

We need to grow out of the pain, have hope (however small) in the future and water the garden of our life, because you never know what lies beneath the soil. Maybe a tiny seed waiting to sprout, or a tiny leaf almost about to unfurl - and in that hope we must go on. So as I comfort my friend and also try to get out of my own pain, i think of the stars i see so clearly on my trips to bali and i look to my प, for exactly like them I too will continue to shine and glow. and in time, I too will heal. 

यह जीना भी न जीना भी 

हैं दोनों का तुमसे ही वास्ता 

हो ओ मैं ही तो हूँ तेरा पता 

हैं दूसराना  कोई रास्ता 

आये मुझ तक वो  तुमको हैं जो ढूंढ़ता 

मेरी खामोशियों में हैं तू बोलता 

ये जीना भी न जीना भी 

जो भी हुआ हैं वो तुमसे हुआ 

reposted from my yoga blog with a few edits