the mad flower

It’s the usual evening dressed in colors of black mostly, where the sounds of the impatient sky is echoing in confusion it seems and the image of the beautiful sun is getting blurry. And the insects are bustling in rhythm, trying to fetch a meal for their family. And the valley is surrounded by an unusual touch of melancholia—unlike the ones that just visited us yesterday or the day before that. There is just something peculiarly different about this evening.

Somebody once said that all great things are filled with tragedy, or was it I, who had to name an intermediary because the thought would not leave my mind. How could I just get up and walk when the only thing that kept me going all this while seemed to slowly lose itself in the valley.

The valley was special because a million flowers called it their home. Their magic left a million people intrigued, wholly addicted to its scent, like a new drug had entered the market and swayed a million more next to its tender stems, swiftly turning the stage into a Prozac-free nation.

The flowers listened and they spoke to us with genuineness. The gardens which staged them slowly turned into a shrine, the valley of the demi-gods, the humans endlessly uttered. Music was slow-beat but life was almost, if not completely, a splendid enchantment, no conscious human could ever resist.

If I remember correctly, everything was fine, until, one evening during August of last year, things changed irreversibly. The flowers had lost their sense of sanity. They had gone mad and there was nobody there to help them anymore.

The crowd disappeared, and the million had vanished into thin air like no human had even lived. ‘O life out of misery, is this what you call beauty?’ whispered one of the flowers. It felt like I could hear its pain like nobody ever could.

My song had also died right when theirs did. The on-goer called the flowers mad, and so did the next, and the one after that as well. It was the new attire called madness that the flowers had to wear everywhere they went.

But tragic, it is a tragedy that we’ve come to this place naked, and a greater tragedy when there is nobody to offer us any silk or cotton.

‘Don’t leave us,’ pleaded a flower to my left. ‘I’m now mad, I’m now mad sire.’

How could I ever contain my tears after listening to what I just did? This dust and everything that is, could not even be there for the other at the time when it was needed the most.

‘I will never…I will never,’ I unconditionally assured. ‘Do you realize that you’ve made a million smile when they needed you the most? Do you realize that you’ve made me walk when I could not even think of getting out of my bed?’

‘I will never leave, I can never.’

-Yogesh Chandra