Making a pookalam for Onam is more about the journey than the destination

The butterflies are here before me. A pair of cabbage whites chase one another into the depths of my unkempt garden. It is difficult to not compare them to thoughts. Quick, fragile and fleeting. I pick up where they left off and toss five little aripoovu into what once used to be a fruit basket. It is crazy to think that this little bouquet of flowers arrived in the perfect shade of orange to lure the right bees. How ingenious it sounds, the lengths to which it went for the advancement of its species. And here I am, at daybreak, surrounded by the soft stretching of my furry animals, feeling sorry for the young mother in the neighbourhood. Her child has taken it upon herself to compete with the volley of pressure cooker whistles. Stubborn wails, sharp and piercing like the first rays of dawn.

Six or seven years, I gauge her age by the near-perfect pronunciation of the Malayalam alphabet, zha. Had she been born a couple of decades ago, she’d be on her way now with friends to gather flowers for the Onam pookalam. This neat little ritual, I’d like to believe, arose from wanting to keep children away from bustling kitchens where 28 dishes for a sadya would each be in various stages of production. Scraping, grinding, tempering. A neat little trick to keep them busy till the heady whiff of papadams rising in hot coconut oil ushered them back in.

Pookalam was once a hand-drawn little thank-you note in exchange for an abundant harvest. Mahabali, the beloved mythical king of Kerala, was just a ruse. As a hero, he does sound better than the religious ones. His bio would have read ‘I treat my subjects equally’. Thoughts wander far and away as I pluck Nandiyaarvattams, the very first flower I planted in the backyard, humming old Malayalam songs that are a mausoleum of forgotten flowers.

None of these flowers are traditionally invited to be part of a pookalam. Who makes these rules anyway? Most of these are varathar (outsiders, not native) but so are the banana slugs—a native of North America, now a regular in Kerala—who help fix the soil. While our backyards and balconies sport a rich and varied melting pot of flora and entomofauna, the one image still easily associated with pookalam is the pink and orange of arali and marigold. Bruised and bursting from blue polythene cover seams. And the pointless pookalam competitions galore. Like Indian poet Kamala Surraiyya described the smell of the cut flowers in the vases, these petals too smell of human sweat. Of commodification. In the hurry to keep traditions alive, are we really losing sight of the why. Why make a pookalam, really?

Sure, it is about coming together and the camaraderie. But the act of making a pookalam is in pausing, pondering, maybe even just looking. When you look at something familiar for too long, you can sense it shift focus into something unfamiliar. It reveals itself to you. Parts of yourself too. I arch my back, stand on my toes and reach for some bougainvillaea that playfully bounces away. Its flowers are, in fact, leaves, and the real flower is white and precious, tucked inside like a memory.

I make a note to visit my old rental house to say hello to the bright pink curls of the bougainvillaea I once planted which now cascade over the nameplate of the abandoned house, Belvedere.

Last night, from the high-rise apartment and the normalcy of her brand new life in a different city after the death of my father, my mother told me, “This year, we don’t have Onam.” I come back to the same questions: Who makes these rules? What do harvest and grieving have to do with one other? Why is the grieving period only a year then? When we discuss the weather and dinner, my mind drifts to the tiny 600sqft Bombay apartment of my childhood. The box grills were a motley of flowers, big and small. Mostly plucked in the evening, and offered to glass-framed deities. Like American poet Ellen Bass, I also can’t fathom why there is such pleasure in remembering.

Rajamalli, the peacock flowers that not long ago embroidered the sky, now lie in a corner of my basket. Is there a work of art that can rival the perfection of a flower? In such moments of wonder, even the non-religious like me look for the creator. It was, after all, in one single flower, that Virginia Woolf glimpsed a universe of interconnectedness. While there are no deities in my house as an adult, gardening as a form of prayer is something I can get on board with.

The mussaenda tree whimpers under the weight of its flowers. So I pull out a whole cluster. The petals would go in the inner ring of the pookalam. Memories, if tangible, would have the texture of mussaenda petals. Dreamy, velvety and out of the world.

Where I grew up, we never got Onam holidays. What I do remember is coming back from school to a glass of cold kadala payasam and my father’s stories that were a staple for any kind of celebration. In the shade of the mussaenda, I search for the name of the tree that my father once spoke about—the one he and his friends would shake and make it rain flowers. In this borrowed memory, the flurry was, like most happy things, yellow. There’s no way now to cross-check. How I wish I could ring him up to ask its name. Or just locate this tree. Only to shake it with an urgency to bring someone back to reality.

Maybe the names don’t matter at all. “How often do we name something after its briefest form?” a version of American poet Ocean Vuong’s question props up in my mind. I dig out the rest. “A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. Rosebush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.”

In the neat frame where my phone ironed the soil, two chunky caterpillars appear, straight out of a Pixar movie. Their black and neon skin pop in the mud as if it were coloured in using sketch pens. My phone tells me that these would soon grow into plain brown moths. They beg to be a metaphor for adults who leave behind the bright colours of their childhood.

In many ways, collecting the material for a pookalam is more satisfying than executing the design. What matters is not tradition, not art even, but the process. Wandering and picking are practices that have nourished mankind since the age of foraging. Step out. Sometimes, looking is enough. Allow beauty to touch you. Grow a flower from seed before it is too late. Or just appreciate that which grows around you without any help or intervention. The more you look, the more you will want to celebrate it, preserve it.

The hibiscus has been shadowed by the yellow bell plant. I hesitate to pick the only two that bloomed. But then I remember two things. Hibiscus is androgynous; what you would call a strong and independent flower. They need no bees, nor butterflies. Talk about a role model. The second, being the annoyingly sensitive child that I was, I remember what amma taught me about pruning and deadheading, when I badgered her with questions. “Why can’t we just not kill the flowers? Why not let them stay on the plant?” I remember what I imagined. Flowers as locks of curls. Is there a word for revisiting what you once imagined as a child?

Picking fallen flowers from the soil would sound like a bad idea, but this is where I find the showstopper. Parijatham, twinkly and intoxicating, turns the morning earth into a star-studded night. Before loving another, maybe we should learn to love a flower, something, anything that doesn’t last long.

I tear up my thoughts and get to the act. The resident Mahabali waves as he crosses my house in a tempo traveller. As I work, the trees around me seem to hold their breath. The garden grows quieter, rapt. Birds and bees are about to log off after their morning shift. When I finally place the last petal and stand back to admire the interplay of art and nature, I can almost hear the shimmer of the leaves. The soft applause of the wind.

Also read:

10 saris that will see you through Onam celebrations this year

A brief history of the intimate tradition of oral recipe sharing

The grey area between cultural appropriation and appreciation