A Thing of beauty is a Joy for an Hour

Some time ago I had posted a blog about our roadside plants. Elaborating the same, I would like to start by saying that the plants are in full bloom and a lot of flowers beautify the road, just for an hour or sometimes, even less. I had mentioned that there exist many plant thieves. However, the number of flower thieves far exceeds their number.

These thieves come at all odd hours. I never believed in plucking flowers myself for use in our own God’s room till I realized that I may also pluck flowers from the garden nurtured by me when the entire world steals flowers without any qualm!

On one of the rare days, when no one had stolen flowers, I took some photographs. Included in the photos is a beautiful Lily (I do not know the name of the plant) globular in shape with multiple flowers within it. I was lucky to photograph the same. However, when I went back into the house for other jobs and returned after an hour the whole thing had vanished!

Similarly there is a very good yield of “Kanigale” flowers only to be stolen by others. The theft was even faster. My m-i-l was sitting in the verandah till 1 PM. I returned from my clinic at 1.30 PM. Within this half an hour, somebody had polished off the entire “Yield”! On another occasion, I went for work at 3.30 PM. By the time I returned at 4.30 PM, the entire yield had disappeared.

Once I happened to catch a thief red-handed. He was an elderly man, had no shame, remorse or any such feeling when I caught him. What is wrong if I pluck flowers when I am offering the same to God? – He asks me! I never knew that God loves stolen flowers more than those that were grown by the devotee or purchased by him! I took the bag from him, poured the lot over his head and asked him then to offer the same to God. Can you believe if I say that he picked up the whole thing and walked off? Only when I caught him for the second time and warned of serious consequences, he stopped walking in front of our house.

These thieves include people from all classes, age and sex no bar. Most of them are morning walkers carrying plastic bags in their hands. They land in front of your house long before you wake up and steal the flowers in a jiffy! Some of them even open the gates, enter the house premises and steal the flowers grown within the compound also. They teach their children the finer aspects of stealing flowers from somebody else’s house

There are other types of thieves called the “Commercial Thieves”. They are the small time flower vendors. They hunt for flowers since the price in anything between 10-20 Rs a meter. These stolen flowers easily add up to 3-4 meters in addition to the flowers purchased by them and thus they earn an “extra income” of about a thousand rupees a month. A good business indeed!

In the end, it is the flower grower who groans and is made to look foolish for having grown them to last for just an hour after blooming!