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DOWN MEMORY LANE
The eternal charm of flowers
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Chitli Qabar and Chandni Chowk are two places worth visiting for buying some lovely flowers, says R.V. SMITH
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The flower-sellers of Delhi exude a charm of their own. When the day is spent they sit selling the seasonal flowers which attract the eye and give an all-pervading feeling of freshness. In summer it is the motia, chameli, raat-ki-rani and the chandni
flowers that fall like moonlight in the quiet of the night as though some lover was showering his emotions on his beloved. It looks as though the world of flowers is far removed from the one where we encounter the heavy traffic and rush for daily bread which causes every man, woman and child to sweat it out and makes one wonder if Wordsworth was right when he heard the “still sad music of humanity”. Perhaps the music is there when the mind wills and that’s when one’s at ease, not hurrying about but loitering.
Worth visiting
The rows of flower-sellers in Chitli Qabar and Chandni Chowk are two places worth visiting on an evening. Pause here a while and eye the blooms on white, red, pink, purple or yellow flowers. Think of the gardeners who tended them with love, the dewdrops that opened the petals every morning and the butterflies that settled on them, or the bees and the birds that befriended these givers of perfume and happiness. Buy a few from the girl, a veritable flower, the one who sits with her hair open, needling the motias into garlands, each containing a huge rose. She has spent a lot of time on each but would willingly sell them to you rather than allow the flowers to dry up and die.
In Chandni Chowk once Moghul princesses came from the Red Fort to buy gajras for their hairdo. Modern women do the same. But in those days flowers did not cost as much as they do now, for they were aplenty. Eunuchs accompanied those medieval damsels, but if they had to meet their lovers at the flower-sellers they did so with many a subterfuge thrown in for the purpose. The lovers were not all noblemen; humbler souls too were favoured. Times have changed but not the flowers.
In Chitli Qabar on a Thursday you can see the charm of flowers, with both men and women buying them for the weekly devotions at the shrines where the qawwalis are sung with gusto and sometimes a lover catches a glimpse of his future wife in the smoke of joss-sticks.
But long after all the pretty faces have ceased to dazzle the bazaar a half-blind bearded man sits patiently waiting for more customers, and when they are long in coming he caresses the rose petals by the handful for they seem to be dearer to his heart than all the beloveds.
Babar’s gardens
Babar, in his yearning for the gardens and cool streams of Kabul, introduced the art of Moghul gardening in India by laying out his Charbagh on the left bank of the Yamuna at Agra. The work begun by him reached its fullness in the reign of Shah Jahan, who laid a hundred gardens round Delhi and Agra.
But nothing escapes time, however great. Gardens and flowers that lend enchantment to the eye and the heart, however, are on a different plane and the thought of their disappearance makes one sad. Traces of some of Delhi’s discarded gardens can still be found. It would, therefore, be appropriate if, acting on the advice offered 90 years ago by the famous Moghul gardening expert, Ms. C.M. Vililers Stuart, these were replanted.
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