Of unsanctioned love, a flower with heady scent myriad meanings and subtle nuances

Because I was born into Bangla, Hindi and its post offices of meaning arriving much later, the Hindi regimental quick march song, Kadam Kadam Badhaye Ja, came as a call for carnival. The reason was the presence of kadam, what to me seemed like a lonely Bangla word in a fun Hindi song—keep on increasing the count of kadam flowers, and so on. The song would make its appearance at the annual sports event in school, and its drumbeat rhythm ‘moved’ me, yes, literally. But what I loved most about it was imagining—even recollecting from my then young childhood—myself collecting kadam flowers with my mother from under a huge tree.

The fragrance of the kadam flowers (the Neolamarckia cadamba), the indescribable smell of something caught in process, trapped on its journey of turning into fruit, my mother had, in her innocent simile, likened to the smell of a bride. It was a strange comparison, given that she had gone collecting the kadam flowers to make them into a pickle or chutney that she had caught in a piece of neighbourhood gossip when she and my father lived in Balurghat, a frontier town in Bengal’s Dinajpur district, before my brother and I arrived into their life. We had come to collect these delicate flowers, now fallen on the ground, always on the verge of being squashed by human feet, in Milanpally, a locality in Siliguri, full of old government offices, all painted yellow. Everyone in our town called this part of the locality ‘Housing’— there were no flats or apartment complexes in Siliguri then, only houses, and this sight of ‘houses’ piled on top of another, with the possibility of them toppling over any moment, must have given birth to this name. Not one ‘house’, not the unfamiliar ‘flat’, but many, all of them similar, like twins— ‘housing’. It wasn’t the architecture alone that was bureaucratic. A bureaucratic gardener—one wouldn’t ever know whether it was on instruction from a superior or his own eccentric ethic—had planted a kadam tree in front of each yellow building.

The air, especially in the evenings, in this provincial town then without an overdose of polluting automobiles, ought to have been bottled and sold by an enterprising entrepreneur. But it was the times, and perhaps the spirit of indolence that the fragrance of the kadam indulged that turned otherwise sane citizens into illicit lovers and happy thieves. My mother was the latter and the epithet about illicit love came from her for I was too young to even understand love. Kadam is not a flower for married love; for that there was the white and heady rajnigandha, the flower of the night. Kadam is a flower of the evening, for lovers returning home, for those who know that they shall never live in the same home. Perhaps that is why the rajnigandha has been canonised by the vase. The kadam is for fleeting love, even an infatuation for a stranger, it is the smell of roadside love, the love under an umbrella, not under a roof. My mother had constructed these neat binaries—these helped buttress her moral universe. And more than anything else, she liked to believe that it would help her child-rearing. But on that particular evening, her motive was utterly utilitarian. My brother and I were to collect as many flowers as we could. The recipe would come later. We had different descriptions for the flower: my brother, who loved the props and paraphernalia that created the feeling of seriousness in our father’s office on Hill Cart Road, the busiest street in our town, likened the kadam flower to a pincushion with soft pins. I, who had never seen a hedgehog in my life except in a school textbook of natural science, likened it to the animal with bristly thorns. Our mother, who had tired of cleaning milk bottles, thought it a better smelling bottle cleaning brush. The differences in our descriptions did not affect our collection for the day: we returned with two bagfuls of kadam flowers, the three of us, a young mother and her two children, perfuming the path our cycle rickshaw travelled through.

When I got married according to Bengali customs and my husband refused to wear the topor, the conical hat made of sholapith, having likened it to a dunce cap that would inaugurate this new career, I laughed for the wrong reason. From two sides of the topor hang two sholapith kadam flowers. I will never know what they stand for, but I, like one who had suddenly discovered a third eye, remembered that such kadam flowers were hung from walls and pandals and humans as bearers of good fortune. I called out to my mother and pointed to the poor flower balls on the prop of married love: ‘Illicit love’, I said. There must be something special about the first seasonal flowering of the kadam flower—why else would so many Bengali artistes write about it? There is the famous Tagore song, Badal din-er prothom kadam phool, the first kadam flower of the monsoon, from which the popular 1970 Bangla film, Prothom Kadam Phool, takes its name. Stories about unsanctioned love and the kadam tree come to me from our many literatures. Hindu myths and devotionals tell us about Krishna’s fondness for the kadam tree. One episode in particular reminds me of my mother’s ascription of the kadam flower to illicit love. This is in Vrindavan, where Varuna has forbidden nude bathing in public water spaces. But the gopis wouldn’t listen. So Krishna collects their garments and hangs them from the kadam tree—what follows, the pleading by the gopis and the teasing, has been documented countless times in our literature, both sacred and secular. Many of the Radha-Krishna episodes also take place under the subtly scented air of the kadam tree.

‘Parvathi’s tree’ in many parts of northern India, the tree deity standing guard at the entrance of the Meenakshi temple where ‘the festival of Kadamba’ is celebrated every year, its fruit once having given a dynasty its name, I wonder why it has completely disappeared from our urban lives, in spite of the tree being an easy child. Aryabhatta is said to have discovered why people do not fall off the earth in spite of it being round after looking at the steady spines of the kadam fruit. Now sweetmeat makers prepare a sweet called raskadamba, a round sweet coated with tiny sugar balls to resemble the kadam’s spines. It’s like an éclair – you take a bite and discover a soft stuffing. Is that love illicit too?